Deeper than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema 9781441162199, 9781628928648, 9781441174970

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
1 Sweet on the Inside: Trauma, Memory, and Israeli Cinema
Trauma and memory studies
Deeper than oblivion
Notes
Bibliography
2 Postscript to Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation
The Arab-Jew and the inscription of memory
The Mizrahi cinema of displacement
Revisionist cultural practice
Notes
Bibliography
3 Gender, the Military, Memory, and the Photograph: Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling and American Films about Abu Ghraib
Notes
Bibliography
4 The Event and the Picture: David Perlov’s My Stills and Memories of the Eichmann Trial
Introduction
The aesthetic of delayed cinema
The passage: A dialectic of inside and outside
The event: The everyday and the historic
The memory of the image in Memories of the Eichmann Trial (1979)
Conclusion: Photographs as testimony of testimony
Notes
Bibliography
5 The Agonies of an Eternal Victim: Zionist Guilt in Avi Mograbi’s Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi
The character’s double status
Accountability
The discourse of victimhood
The father, the son, and the feeling of guilt
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
6 Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort
The ghosts of war
Traumatic recollections
Forgotten army
Archive trauma
Beaufort fever
Notes
Bibliography
7 Memory of a Death Foretold: Fathers and Sons in Assi Dayan’s “Trilogy”
After the myth of the binding of Isaac
Once there were green fields; or the death of the mythological Sabra
Life According to Agfa; or the simulation of an organizing principle for a chaotic Israeli life
Patricide as salvation: An Electric Blanket Named Moshe
The chosen son’s death: Mr. Baum
Dr. Pomerantz : “There is no plan, we live, period”
Conclusion: Awakening from a nightmare?
Notes
Bibliography
8 Queering Terror: Trauma, Race, and Nationalism in Palestinian and Israeli Gay Cinema during the Second Intifada
Diary of a Male Whore— hustling and the unending occupation
The Bubble—projecting a suicidal fantasy
Gevald—a queer terrorist show
Conclusion—queering terror
Notes
Bibliography
9 “Our Traumas”: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen Days
Frozen days
Intensified discontinuity
Family romances
A double horror
Notes
Bibliography
10 History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema
The 1940s and 1950s: The Holocaust and documentary film
The 1960s and 1970s: Same but different
Later years (1980s–90s): New currents
The 2000s: The trauma of the expulsion of Palestine’s Arabs in Kedma
Traumatic traces in Khirbet Khizeh and Waltz with Bashir
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
11 Last Train to the Holocaust
Murderers among us
Why can’t the German learn to speak?
She owns the Holocaust
Sucking it up—sinking it in
Some came back, some went running
Matchmaker, matchmaker, look through your book
Rarer than the unicorn
Notes
Bibliography
12 Passages, Wars, and Encounters with Death: The Desert as a Site of Memory in Israeli Film
A modern exodus: From exile to the homeland
Death on the desert frontier
Border-crossings and reverse passages
Death in the desert: An alternative narrative
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
13 “Walking through walls”: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory
Blocking/Transference
Mapping documentary
“Treefurcation”
“This is a 9 star hotel”
Walking through walls
Tunnel trade
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

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Deeper than Oblivion

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Deeper than Oblivion Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema

Edited by Raz Yosef and Boaz Hagin

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2013 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Raz Yosef, Boaz Hagin and Contributors, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Deeper than oblivion : trauma and memory in Israeli cinema / edited by Raz Yosef and Boaz Hagin. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-6219-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Motion pictures–Social aspects–Israel–History and criticism. 2. War films–Israel–History and criticism. 3. Documentary films–Israel–History and criticism. 4. Psychic trauma in motion pictures. 5. Memory in motion pictures. 6. Arab-Israeli conflict– Motion pictures and the conflict. I. Yosef, Raz, 1967– editor of compilation. II. Hagin, Boaz, 1973– editor of compilation. PN1993.5.I86D44 2013 791.43095694–dc23 2012050833 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-6219-9 PB: 978-1-5013-1961-7 e-pub: 978-1-4411-9926-3 e-pdf: 978-1-4411-7497-0 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain

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For our partners, Alex and Oded

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Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

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Sweet on the Inside: Trauma, Memory, and Israeli Cinema Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef

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1

Postscript to Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation Ella Shohat

21

Gender, the Military, Memory, and the Photograph: Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling and American Films about Abu Ghraib Diane Waldman

51

The Event and the Picture: David Perlov’s My Stills and Memories of the Eichmann Trial Anat Zanger

73

The Agonies of an Eternal Victim: Zionist Guilt in Avi Mograbi’s Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi Shmulik Duvdevani

93

Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort Raz Yosef

117

Memory of a Death Foretold: Fathers and Sons in Assi Dayan’s “Trilogy” Yael Munk

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Queering Terror: Trauma, Race, and Nationalism in Palestinian and Israeli Gay Cinema during the Second Intifada Raya Morag

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Contents

9 “Our Traumas”: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen Days Boaz Hagin

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10 History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni

223

11 Last Train to the Holocaust Judd Ne’eman and Nerit Grossman

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12 Passages, Wars, and Encounters with Death: The Desert as a Site of Memory in Israeli Film Yael Zerubavel

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13 “Walking through walls”: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory Janet Walker

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Notes on Contributors Index

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Figures

3.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 9.1 9.2 9.3 13.1 13.2 13.3 13.4 13.5 13.6 13.7 13.8

Meytal Sandler from To See If I’m Smiling by Tamar Yarom The dancers’ perfect muscular male bodies in Wasted “Welcome to Beaufort!” The internal space of the Beaufort outpost: Koris in the “submarine” The external space of the Beaufort outpost: Concrete layers that seem to bury the soldiers alive Liraz, the commander of Beaufort The burning archive: The explosion of Beaufort outpost Liraz’s “archive fever”: Gazing at the burning Beaufort outpost Flashback to childhood voyeurism, Essam in Diary of a Male Whore Romantic love enables denial of the Occupation: Ashraf and Noam in The Bubble Palestinian Passing in The Bubble: Lulu, Noam, Ashraf, and Yali The Donkeys’ Wedding—Gevald Youssuf and Jabbar—kinging in Gevald Meow visits Alex in the hospital Frozen Days—an Israeli mind-game film The protagonist of Frozen Days The assumed path of workers in and out of Israel The construction of space through the first 32 shots of 9 Star Hotel Planting trees in Israel Positioning the “9 Star Hotel” Crossing the wadi; 9 Star Hotel The wadi blocked Blocked space A screen of trees

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Hannah Naveh, Dean of the Faculty of the Arts, and Reuven Palgi-Hecker, Head of the Department of Film and Television, at Tel Aviv University for their guidance and cooperation; Carol Bardenstein at the University of Michigan for her true friendship and good advice; our families and friends, especially Irit Ezra, Yaara Ozery, Oded Israel, and Alex Pavlovski, for their help, encouragement, and support for this project; the contributors for taking chances and exploring new avenues for studying trauma and memory in Israeli cinema; Katie Gallof at Bloomsbury Academic for inviting us to edit this book and for her patience and help throughout its writing. Finally, we would also like to express our gratitude to Yossi Lemel for generously allowing us to use his art work “Anatomy of a Conflict” for the book cover of Deeper than Oblivion. This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 133/10). We would like to thank the following sources for their permission to reprint articles: Excerpts from Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010) are reprinted by permission of I.B.Tauris; and Raz Yosef, “Traces of War: Trauma, Memory and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort,” Cinema Journal 50, no. 2 (2010) is used by permission of University of Texas Press. Raz Yosef and Boaz Hagin Tel Aviv, August 2012

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Sweet on the Inside: Trauma, Memory, and Israeli Cinema Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef

The complexities and paradoxes of trauma and memory are no longer a secret in Israeli cinema. Israeli screens are thronged by fiction and documentary films and videos dealing with personal and group traumas and memories and questioning national histories and commemorations. The traumas of victims and victimizers and the darker sides of official history and nostalgic memories are repeatedly exposed. They are tied to war and terrorism; to the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftermath; to the sins of colonialism and racism; to the experience of being uprooted immigrants; to a militarist, homophobic, sexist society; and to attempts to realize conformist utopias in kibbutzim, Ultraorthodox communities, the supposedly meritocratic people’s army, settlements in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, or the hip neighborhoods of Tel Aviv.1 In a certain sense, there is considerable enjoyment in feeling as if one has just unmasked a deep, repressed secret, and many films and film scholars are happy to guide us on such hermeneutic outings into the past.2 Yet, today, too many traumas and memories are far from being repressed in the inaccessible recesses of the unconscious. Israeli popular culture and academic writing are all too familiar with them. Delving into silenced realms of the past can help us to address suffering and wrongs that have remained unacknowledged. However, the trappings of such revelations can also serve political posturing. They can signal attempts by moving-image makers to conform to the formats of local and international television industries and to cater to the demands of distributors of “world cinema.” And they can be used by scholars to apply onto local cinematic texts the latest global fads in the humanities. In Israeli politics, the trauma of the Holocaust is a wildcard that can be used to trump any rival argument and

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groups can ground their identities in oppressed memories of victimhood while ignoring their responsibility for shaping the present and the future and their own roles as victimizers.3 Traumas and complex structures of memory now risk being over-familiar and being coopted into the bland mainstream where they no longer disturb and can serve politics as usual. Perhaps the trope of depth, with its repressed secrets and dramatic unveilings, has lost some of its sting, but these memories and traumas and the issues they deal with are very real and it is exactly because they can be manipulated so easily and risk inundating us that they merit our vigilance and continued attention. It behooves us as scholars to discover and create new ways of approaching trauma and memory, the beyond or otherwise of facile manipulations of “depth” as revealing the unknown truth.4 We might start by judging this book by its cover. The image, created by one of Israel’s leading graphic designers and visual artists, Yossi Lemel, is based on a poster of his exhibition titled “Anatomy of a Conflict.” The object being operated upon is the fruit of the prickly pear cactus, known in Israel as sabres or tsabar, and from which the term Sabra, the new Israeli-born Jew, is derived. The sabra fruit is rough and prickly on the outside but sweet on the inside, as, allegedly, are the human Sabras—we can be a tad uncouth and do cut in line sometimes but we are nice once you get to know us. Lemel’s image struck us arousing conflicting interpretations, emotions, and associations that also motivated this collection which seeks to question trauma and memory in Israeli cinema. The sabra in the image is clearly not well—the helpless sabra seems to be bleeding and perhaps undergoing some kind of surgery. It seems to be injured, recalling the Greek term for wound—“trauma.” The metal tools violating its body might be medical devices in the service of healing, but might also be instruments that are being used by a sadistic mad dentist, or scientists dissecting the sabra, prodding its sweet flesh, and putting it on display for our viewing pleasure. The image is also sexually suggestive with the incision creating a vaginal orifice in the violated sabra and bringing to mind the sexual nature attributed to some traumas and repressed memories since the late nineteenth century and the porous borders between prurient voyeurism and scientific inquiry’s will to knowledge. Assuming that the photography studio’s lights did not damage it, the sabra is probably still edible. The sabra’s thorns have been removed and it can be handled without any risk. Digging into the depths of the wounded sabra can be delicious and safe as well as sexual. Yet, the object being operated upon is not human or animal and the entire image is very carefully composed. This is a stylized façade of injury and pain, a performance of trauma, and the fruit feels nothing. Perhaps the image is

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warning us that when dealing with trauma and memory, especially of symbols like the sabra, we are always in danger of anthropomorphizing and misreading clichéd posing as evidence of a deeper truth that has more to do with our own projections than whatever it is the object in the image might actually feel or might have undergone. We might also wonder to what era the poster alludes. There is an aura of the outmoded and perhaps nostalgic in the choice of putting a prickly pear at the center of an Israeli poster. It harks back to a bygone era in which Israel and the pre-State Yishuv tried to define its image through Jaffa oranges, healthy workers on the Kibbutz, and new Israeli-born Jews tied to the land and living in harmony with its non-Jewish population. Following this image, we could ask when Israeli cinema started addressing the issue of trauma and memory. No doubt, dealing with these topics in a sophisticated and aesthetically innovative way is a characteristic of contemporary Israeli cinema beginning in the 1990s.5 But it is not entirely new. Even before the modernist experimentations of the Israeli New Sensibility cinema of the second half of the 1960s and 1970s and the more politically engaged films since the late 1970s that were willing to give more room to outsiders and outcasts, including Holocaust survivors and shell-shocked soldiers,6 trauma and complex webs of memory were not absent from Israeli screens. In fact many films did not seem to be able, or interested in, creating simple, linear, causal narratives. Already in the 1940s, some Zionist and early Israeli propaganda films featured traumatized Holocaust survivors. Their plots never quite managed to insert these survivors and the Holocaust into the official Zionist narrative, which attempted to chart a linear course from the destruction wrought by the Holocaust in Europe to redemption in the land of Israel.7 Some of the earliest feature films in Israel that deal with the recent past have convoluted temporal structures suggesting that they are not quite certain how these events should be conveyed and perhaps implying that they are still haunted by the past. Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (Thorold Dickinson, 1955) begins at the end, with its protagonists—four heroes in the War of Independence—already dead. It cuts back and forth between a close up of each corpse and a roll call in which their names were read when they were still alive several hours earlier. The film then proceeds to multiple flashbacks of three of the four protagonists, which they recount as they prepare for their mission and travel to Hill 24 which they are ordered to take and hold. The story then returns to the results of their mission and the finding of their bodies, and concludes with aerial shots of Israel and the title “THE BEGINNING” (instead of more common “The End”). Although less

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complex, other Israeli historical films also begin at the end before going back in time, such as What a Gang (Zeev Havatzelet, 1963) and Clouds over Israel (Sinayah, Ivan Longyel [Ilan Eldad], 1966), suggesting that a simple linear chain of events was somehow not adequate to the stories Israeli cinema was trying to convey and that something about the past had not yet been put to rest. The commercially successful compilation of old Israeli and pre-State newsreels accompanied by flippant narration, The True Story of Palestine (Ets ‘o Palestain, Nathan Axelrod, Joel Silberg, Uri Zohar, 1962), although mostly telling the standard official narrative of the creation of the State of Israel, does not in fact convey it as a simple linear plot. Rather, it opens with an old film featuring a musical act, which, according to the narrator shows that “already thirty years ago the Mat’at’e Theater was singing about the good old days that even then were already over.” The film goes on to briefly enumerate the many achievements of the State of Israel and show dancing in the streets during the Independence Day celebrations, when the narrator tells the dancers to stop. The film freezes and the narrator insists on starting “at the beginning.” He asks who took the People of Israel out of Egypt, as the film appears to be rewinding and reaches an image of the biblical Moses holding the Ten Commandments. “Hardly 3,000 years passed,” the narrator continues as the film appears to whiz forward, “and who told the Jews to leave their exile? That’s right! Herzl,” as the film stops on a picture of the founder of modern political Zionism. It continues with the first Zionists who arrived in Israel and with filmmaker Nathan Axelrod coming with his “Kinoapparat” and making his moving pictures. It is only now that the narrator, addressing the audience, announces that “our historical film begins.” Most of the film is a roughly linear account of the major events leading from the first Zionist settlers in Palestine, through the struggles and fight for independence against the British and Arab armies, to the successful founding of the State and the opening of its borders to the Jews who had not been allowed to enter during the Holocaust and now had a homeland. It then returns to the frozen frame of the Independence Day celebrations, the narrator says they can now resume dancing, and the movement recommences as the film concludes. Even this good-natured humorous take on official Zionist history as the Israeli film industry was experimenting with its first feature films seems to warn us not to assume that there ever were “good old days.” Already in the early 1960s it was no secret that collective memories (such as the Independence Day dancing) were in tension with history (which the narrator insists on conveying); that official narratives leave glaring gaps (the bizarre attempt to connect modern

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nationalism with biblical times while ignoring millennia of Diasporic Jewish identity and traumatic catastrophes); and that the films that become part of public memory were not transparent records but part of a deliberate political struggle (the historical arrival of Nathan Axelrod and his film camera are compared with Herzl and the first Zionists to come to the Land of Israel). The role of memory and trauma in Israeli cinema in all periods is far from obvious. It is a theme that floods our screens today but has also never been absent in other ways and modes in previous decades. It traffics in secrets and repressions but does so in a public, international, and highly accessible medium. It purports to reveal unacknowledged truths but its authenticity can easily be questioned. The contents can be harsh, perhaps unbearable and shameful to those remembering, yet there also seems to be some pleasure in making the films, watching them, and scrutinizing them within academic scholarship. We asked the contributors of this book to offer new and critical views on this topic. Happily, they accepted our request and produced innovative essays that challenge prevailing tendencies in trauma and memory studies; combine them with other theoretical approaches; deal with Israeli cinema together with other, non-Israeli texts; inventively regroup and interpret Israeli films; shed light on films and videos that have received little scholarly attention; and attend to the novel aesthetic choices made in these films.

Trauma and memory studies While each of the following chapters has pursued a different theoretical course, most of them address, and sometimes challenge, the current discourse on trauma and memory in the humanities and in film studies.8 Recent interest in trauma is related to the category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), introduced in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association into its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. This category was created following shifts in American psychiatry and also because of social, economic, and political pressures, including opposition to the Vietnam War and the image of the war and its combatants, and feminist struggles during the 1970s.9 As Cathy Caruth notes, “this classification and its attendant official acknowledgment of a pathology has provided a category of diagnosis so powerful that it has seemed to engulf everything around it: suddenly responses not only to combat and to natural catastrophes but also to rape, child abuse, and a number of other violent occurrences have been understood

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in terms of PTSD.”10 Interest in trauma is also related to the renewed critical discussion of the Holocaust in the humanities including the experiences and works of second-generation survivors.11 Trauma has also become a component in some of the critical concern with the representation of oppressed groups and minorities in society (such as women, nonwhites, nonwestern cultural identities, and non-heterosexual identities), as certain groups have tried to deal with their specific past and present traumas, such as slavery and rape.12 Trauma is often defined as an unrepresentable event or series of events adhering to a strange structure of temporality and experience. While the person undergoing a trauma cannot grasp or represent the traumatic event at the time of its occurrence, the victim, sometimes after a “latency period,” is haunted by a belated “return of the repressed,” which is far more disturbing than regular recollections of the past. It is, according to Cathy Caruth, “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event.”13 The trauma that was not experienced and perhaps cannot be remembered, nevertheless intrudes in dreams and behavior, or in persistent attempts to compulsively avoid thoughts, activities, places, or people associated with the trauma. Sigmund Freud suggests that traumas, at least as long as they have not been “worked-through” in therapy, tend to be “acted out” under a compulsion to repeat. The patient revives the forgotten experience instead of recalling and processing it.14 Sophisticated, often psychoanalytically inspired, studies of memory and testimony, and particularly those dealing with the recollection of traumatic events, see them as inseparable from fantasies and retrospective revisions. For example, Freud claims that in memory, a later event might endow an earlier one with pathogenic force, rendering it a trauma only through “deferred action” or Nachträglichkeit,15 revising it after the fact. Elsewhere, he coins the term “screen memory” (Deckerinnerung) to refer to a childhood memory that condenses and conceals a large number of other, previous or subsequent, childhood experiences, fantasies, and retroactively projected fantasies.16 Scholars such as Cathy Caruth, Thomas Elsaesser, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, E. Ann Kaplan, Susannah Radstone, and Janet Walker have explored the irresolvable contradictions and paradoxical structures of memory and trauma and the crisis they present for conventional understandings of concepts such as truth, referentiality, and realism and the challenges they pose for textual representations and for bearing witness.17 Scholars of memory and trauma have also looked at ways in which collectives, such as nations and sub-, supra-, and cross-national groups, can remember

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and experience traumas. Many have emphasized that collective memories are not identical with historical studies or records, but are rather an active part of the remembering group’s lived identity, embodied in commemorative work such as symbols, rituals, habits, customs, gestures, and traditions and, in what Pierre Nora views as our almost deritualized world, deliberately created lieux de mémoire such as museums, archives, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, and monuments, as well as film and television. Collective memories offer neither an accurate account of the past nor unchanging commemorative practices. Rather, they shift with time according to the altering needs of groups, which also change over time, selectively remembering, forgetting, distorting, assigning new meanings to ancient words and new words to old practices, appropriating historical events to collectives that did not yet exist, and inventing “traditions,” all of which contribute to the creation of groups such as nations, which are often not as ancient and immutable as they sometimes assert.18 Some scholars also find the notion of trauma to be helpful in explaining collective experiences and behaviors. Kai Erikson defines collective trauma as “a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality.”19 All those involved in the ordeal—certainly the victims, but also witnesses or even the perpetrators— can suffer from collective trauma. The event (or series of ongoing events) shocks the collective and destabilizes the very way it perceives itself. Sometimes it is hard to recall the event, and even harder to represent it and incorporate it within the stories that the group uses to understand itself and organize its past. More often than not, nations prefer to forget certain traumatic events, which are perceived as threatening or shameful, and which might be too dangerous for society, even if this “forgetting” is not necessarily equivalent to the “repression” or “amnesia” of traumatized individuals, as the facts are not necessarily secret but merely tend to be silenced. Whether it could reasonably be claimed that collectives do repress, suffer from a return of the repressed after a period of latency, and act out traumas that have not been worked-through, is however much more questionable. Freud was willing to carry the analogy between individual and collective traumas quite far.20 Going against the biology of his (and our) time, he accepted the notion of the inheritance of acquired characters and believed that important events that had been disavowed and forgotten by a group can still have an effect even after thousands of years. He could therefore claim that there is “an almost complete conformity” between latency and acting out in an individual who suffers from a

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repressed trauma and a group that can also retain an impression of the past in “unconscious memory-traces,”21 and can then compulsively react to them. While few would be willing to follow Freud’s phylogenetic fantasy, his speculations about the traumas of the Jewish people and insistence on Lamarckism have spurred fascinating thoughts about Jewish identity, which can have ramifications for Israel and Palestine.22 While not insisting on “memory-traces” that can survive unconsciously for thousands of years, writers like Dominick LaCapra have shown that the notions of working-through and acting out by compulsively repeating a trauma can be usefully applied to collectives.23 Marianne Hirsch has shown how it is possible for subjects who did not directly experience a trauma to nonetheless feel an empathic remembrance and a linkage with a past that was not theirs. She coined the term “postmemory” as a way of explaining the belated “memories” experienced by those who did not directly witness the traumatic events: “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor re-created.”24 Hirsch also stresses the ethical dimension of postmemory, which, she claims, is related to ethical empathy between generations, collectives, and cultures that have experienced trauma, between oneself and an other. “It is,” she writes, “a question of adopting the traumatic experiences—and thus also the memories—of others as one’s own, or more precisely, as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story. It is a question of conceiving oneself as multiply interconnected with others of the same, of previous, and of subsequent generations, of the same and of other—proximate and distant—cultures and subcultures. It is a question, more specifically, of an ethical relation to the oppressed or persecuted for which postmemory can serve as a model.”25 (In the Israeli context, for example, we can ask whether Israel’s cinema expresses empathy toward the suffering and traumas of the Palestinians.)

Deeper than oblivion Stemming from these ongoing discourses in the humanities and in film studies, the contributions in this book have each found unique ways to approach the topic of trauma and memory in Israeli cinema.

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The opening chapter is an excerpt from the new postscript to Ella Shohat’s seminal book, first published in 1989, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Shohat looks at what she characterizes as a recent renaissance of Mizrahi and/or Arab-Jewish cultural practices. She notes an emergent Mizrahi cinema and culture in the decade following the publication of the first edition of her book, which, while far from being monolithic, united Jews from diverse regions under the term “Mizrahim.” Shohat looks at critical and revisionist Mizrahi cinematic work that, in sharp contrast to the films that dominated Israeli cinema in the past, has called attention to the chasm between official discourse and the actual experiences of Middle Eastern Jews and that has interrogated the dominant Zionist paradigms and the haunting silences of history. The films, often by the second and third generation, give voice to the “Arab-Jew,” relinking Mizrahim to Arabic and Middle Eastern cultural geography, generating narratives preoccupied with dislocation, the traumatic period of arrival in Israel, and exploring Arab, Iranian, Sephardi, or syncretic Mizrahi cultures that in the past were rejected and confined in the private sphere. Shohat’s chapter thus offers an excellent introduction to the immense diversity and approaches to trauma and memory in contemporary Israeli cinema. Diane Waldman’s and Anat Zanger’s contributions both turn to photography, the still image behind moving images. This is a stillness that perhaps resonates particularly well with the temporality of trauma as a fixation on an event that cannot be worked into the regular flow of memories. Waldman’s essay “Gender, the Military, Memory, and the Photograph: Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling and American Films about Abu Ghraib,” explores the different status of photographs in an Israeli documentary on female soldiers in the Occupied Territories and in American films on Abu Ghraib, which raise important questions about individual morality and responsibility in the face of unconscionable policies and practices. Waldman explores the different status of the photograph within the interviewees’ narration and within the discourse of the films as a whole, asking both about the political efficacy of the films and the morality of films that focus on the trauma of perpetrators. She argues that despite some surface similarities between these films, which deal with photographs of female soldiers as perpetrators and which fascinated the public by confounding traditional gender expectations, they have different functions in their specific national contexts. Zanger’s chapter, “The Event and the Picture: David Perlov’s My Stills and Memories of the Eichmann Trial,” looks at two films by one of Israel’s central

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documentary filmmakers, the late David Perlov, and the analogy between aesthetic and historical perspectives in his work. She focuses on the way in which the present and the past and individual and collective experience are intertwined in Perlov’s unique aesthetic, which combines still photographs and cinematic sequences. Following the work of Walter Benjamin, she ties Perlov’s wandering gaze in urban surroundings with the figure of the flâneur and examines the role of the arcade, collective unconscious, and Perlov’s standpoint with regard to the photographic event and testimony, claiming that by using photography of the everyday and the incidental, Perlov shows us what we have not previously seen, or taken notice of, and also what we did not wish to see or prefer to forget. Questions of ethics and aesthetics and the relations between the private and the public spheres are also central to the chapters that foreground relationships between (actual or allegorical) parents and children. The contributions by Shmulik Duvdevani, Raz Yosef, and Yael Munk all consider trauma and memory in Israeli cinema within intergenerational frameworks. Continuing the previous chapters’ analysis of Israeli documentary films, Duvdevani’s “The Agonies of an Eternal Victim: Zionist Guilt in Avi Mograbi’s Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi” takes Avi Mograbi’s complex 1999 “fictional documentary” as a model for Israeli “I-movies” that were produced in the 1990s and the early 2000s. He reads these films as confessional and as expressing their makers’ acknowledgment of their accountability for formative events during the establishment of the State of Israel and the accompanying Palestinian Nakba that have not yet been atoned and compensated for, although the filmmakers are too young to have participated in them. He notes an attempt by the films’ creators to express their guilt for being party to the injustice perpetrated by their Zionist fathers and their public confession as an effort to include the viewers within the circle of guilt. Yosef ’s “Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort” considers films that explore traumatic events from the First Lebanon War, focusing on Cedar’s 2007 film Beaufort, which he studies together with earlier representations of this war. Yosef maintains that Beaufort exposes a traumatic rupture between history and memory, yet, at the same time, nostalgically expresses an impossible yearning for lost archival collective national memory. Its protagonist tries to assume the position of the failed father and reconstitute masculine military national memory that underwent a crisis prior to the withdrawal from Lebanon. Beaufort, Yosef argues, mourns the loss

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of collective memory and bears witness to the collapse of historical national memory in Israel. Munk’s “Memory of a Death Foretold: Fathers and Sons in Assi Dayan’s ‘Trilogy’” looks at the traces of collective memory and father-and-son relationships in Israeli society as they figure in Dayan’s 1990s four-film “trilogy,” which deconstructs stereotypes and subverts well-established narrative structures. She shows how filmmaker Assi Dayan—as the son of Israel’s most famous general, Moshe Dayan, and as the actor who portrayed the epitome of the mythological Sabra who sacrifices himself in the 1967 film He Walked through the Fields—tried in his “trilogy” to demystify this image, to undermine the secular Binding Myth in Israeli collective memory, and to save the son from a death foretold. One of the persistent traumas for Israelis in recent decades has been life under the constant threat of terrorist attacks. Raya Morag’s and Boaz Hagin’s contributions explore, in very different ways, how certain Israeli films have approached this issue. Morag’s “Queering Terror: Trauma, Race, and Nationalism in Palestinian and Israeli Gay Cinema during the Second Intifada” stands out in this collection for expanding its corpus to include not only Israeli films addressing traumas and memories (including those of Israelis as perpetrators), but also Palestinian cinema. She analyzes films depicting the relationship between the Occupation and terror in Israeli and in Palestinian queer cinema produced during and after the second Intifada (2000–8). Both corpora deal with the post-traumatic queering of race and nationality and with intimate bodily interracial interaction or bonding, while the symbolic and actual violence of the Israeli Occupation precludes the proximity from being free of either past or present traumas. However, while the Israeli films focus on the Western urban gay and lesbian scene infiltrated by terror, the Palestinian film, which this chapter analyzes, focuses on the post-traumatic memory of expulsion and loss of home. A close textual analysis of these films leads according to Morag to a rethinking of cultural concepts, such as parody, mimicry, passing, masturbation, gay shame-pride-humiliation, and gaze and scopic economics, as well as of memory, trauma, and post-trauma. In “‘Our Traumas’: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen Days,” Hagin offers a transnational reading of the 2006 film Frozen Days and some of the statements made by its director. He maintains that the film can be read as an attempt to break away from the standard Israeli “festival film” or “family drama” and as thematizing this ultimately doomed endeavor. The trauma of living with terrorist attacks allows the film to access a different cinematic system and

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especially the genre of the mind-game thriller. Ultimately, the chapter argues, the film fails in its desire to escape its cinematic surroundings, an experience that resonates in the text, and is also tied to its depiction of trauma. While many of the chapters focus on one or a few films, the contributions by Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni, Judd Ne’eman and Nerit Grossman, and Yael Zerubavel look at larger groups of Israeli films. From this vantage point, they can note major trends in Israeli cinema’s dealing with trauma and memory, spot changes over long stretches of time, and pay heed to phenomena that are not present in any one single text. Gertz and Hermoni’s “History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema” studies traumas in Israeli cinema from the earliest years of the State in order to locate its society’s “core traumas” and to examine what has not been told and has been excluded from Israel’s national identity and history. They argue that in the earlier period the pivotal trauma of Israeli society was that of the Holocaust, whereas in later years it became the continuing trauma of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the recurring wars. Ostensibly, these traumas are often dealt with openly in Israeli films and have been successfully worked-through. In fact, there still is a repressed trauma of the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel in 1948 which undercuts the identity of the Jewish subject as a continuing victim of injustice and transformed the victim into a perpetrator, and, according to Gertz and Hermoni, prevents a successful working-through of Israeli traumas. Continuing Judd Ne’eman’s inquiry into guilt in the Israeli films that dealt with the Holocaust in the 1980s and 1990s (“shadow cinema”), in “Last Train to the Holocaust,” Ne’eman and Grossman look at what they take to be a third wave of Israeli films dealing with the Holocaust, made after 2000. Their chapter shows how these films, which mostly do not directly represent events that occurred during the Holocaust, portray anguished journeys where the sense of shame is intertwined with an aspiration for an unachievable outcome: healing the trauma of the Holocaust. They argue that in most of the films the shame is not of those who perpetrated the crimes against humanity, but rather of belonging to the second generation, that is, being the children of Holocaust survivors. The one exceptional film from the period that does show events from the Holocaust is the only one that does not end pessimistically and does preserve the memory of the Holocaust as melancholia. They therefore suggest that a cinematic reconstruction of the events of the Holocaust can help complete the mourning work and make healing a tangible possibility.

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The two final essays in this collection, by Yael Zerubavel and Janet Walker, go beyond the often peculiar temporal structures that characterize trauma and memory and their cinematic representations. Both forge a connection between trauma and memory and studies of place and space, demonstrating the novel insights that can be gained by making a “spatial turn.” Zerubavel, in her chapter “Passages, Wars, and Encounters with Death: The Desert as a Site of Memory in Israeli Film,” studies representations of dramatic moments of death or near-death in the Israeli desert in films made between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. The desert is a theme that has evolved since biblical times and the critical moments of death and near-death relate to a formula of death and rebirth that is at the core of the Zionist vision of national revival and that have their roots in Jewish memory. Zerubavel’s examination of the cinematic representations of the desert as a territory associated with passages, wars, and encounters with death over three decades reveals the dynamic character of space as a site of memory that has been transformed over the years along with other transformations in Israeli collective memory. In all of these films, however, the desert continues to play a major part by virtue of its mythical role as a liminal territory of passages and transitions in Jewish memory that has been incorporated into Israeli memory as well as by virtue of its visual appeal. In the concluding chapter, “‘Walking through walls’: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory,” Walker advocates, and enacts, a “spatial turn” in trauma studies. She not only analyzes a documentary film about the lives of Palestinians working in Israel, but also explores it alongside other technologies of navigation—virtual (such as Google Earth) and actual (on-site witnessing). Looking for ways to unblock passages, remember, and possibly even reconcile traumatic space and place in Israel/ Palestine, she calls for embracing antifundamentalist spatial epistemologies in order to crack open the struggle for contested territories and create a critical and self-critical combination of lived, mapped, and imagined spaces.

Notes 1 For some sense of the extent to which these themes dominate contemporary Israeli cinema and television, see, for example, Shmulik Duvdevani, First Person Camera [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Keter, 2010); Régine-Mihal Friedman, “The Double Legacy of Arbeit Macht Frei,” Prooftexts 22, no. 1–2 (2002): 200–20; Itay Harlap,

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Deeper than Oblivion “The Television After: Trauma and Victimhood in Israeli Drama” [in Hebrew] (PhD Dissertation, Tel Aviv University, 2012); Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2001); Raz Yosef, ed. Special Issue: History and Memory in Israeli Cinema, Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel—History, Society, Culture [in Hebrew] 14 (2008); Raz Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2011); and the various contributions in this volume, and particularly Ella Shohat’s opening chapter. In this sense, investigations that reveal hidden traumas and memories can be seen as a case of what Paul Ricœur has characterized as the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” See Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970); and, in film studies, David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). For an example of the use of the Holocaust to make a political point, see Benjamin Netanyahu, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); for further discussion of memories, traumas, and Israeli politics, see Eva Illouz, “Begin’s Legacy/ Enough of Ethnicity,” Haaretz, February 22, 2012, www.haaretz.com/weekend/ magazine/begin-s-legacy-enough-of-ethnicity-1.414169; Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen. Trauma and memories have been fraught territories since at least the days of railway spine and hysteria. There is no shortage of accusations of falsehoods and cover-ups, of fanciful hysterical women, cowards trying to flee from the front, malingerers looking for an easy profit, and ungrateful children making false accusations against innocent parents implanted in their minds by irresponsible psychoanalysts; or of the representatives of patriarchy, nationalism, and capitalism attempting to shed responsibility for their crimes and to leave their helpless victims without recourse to therapy or even acknowledgment of the authenticity of their illness and veracity of their horrific memories. See, for example, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “Neurotica: Freud and the Seduction Theory,” trans. Douglas Brick, October 76 (Spring 1996): 15–43; Ian Hacking, “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 253–88; Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000); Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984); Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). See Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema.

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6 On the New Sensibility films and their relation to the past and trauma, see Judd Ne’eman, “The Death Mask of the Moderns: A Genealogy of New Sensibility Cinema in Israel,” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 100–28. On the films of the late 1970s and 1980s and the presence of outsiders and outcasts, see Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1993), 175–285. 7 See the chapter by Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni in this volume and Nurith Gertz, Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004). 8 In film and media studies, see Michael Berry, A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); Linnie Blake, The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008); Thomas Elsaesser and Boaz Hagin, Memory, Trauma, and Fantasy in American Cinema [in Hebrew] (Ra’anana: Open University of Israel, 2012); Nurith Gertz and George Khlefi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003); Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, eds., Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008); Adam Lowenstein, Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema and Modern Horror Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Allen Meek, Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories and Images (London: Routledge, 2010); Raya Morag, Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War (Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009); Susannah Radstone, ed., Memory and Methodology (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker, eds., Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (London: Routledge, 2010); Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992); Maureen Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History (New York: Routledge, 1989); Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 9 For a critical historical discussion of the creation of the category of PTSD, see Young, Harmony of Illusions, especially Chapter 3. 10 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3. The psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman opens her well-known book Trauma and Recovery (New

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Deeper than Oblivion York: Basic Books, 1992) with the sentence, “This book owes its existence to the women’s liberation movement.” For a feminist perspective on the history of PTSD see Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 100–12. For a discussion of the history of child abuse in American discourse since the 1960s see Hacking, “Making and Molding of Child Abuse.” See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For a detailed historical description of trauma discourse in psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and society see, for example, Herman, Trauma and Recovery; Leys, Trauma; Elsaesser and Hagin, Memory, Trauma, and Fantasy in American Cinema. Caruth, “Introduction,” 4. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey, (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74), 18: 3–64; “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II),” Standard Edition, 12: 145–56. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973), s.v. “Deferred Action.” Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, s.v. “Screen Memory.” On the relations between trauma and theoretical problems in the humanities, see Thomas Elsaesser, “Postmodernism as Mourning Work,” Screen 42, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 193–201. On testimony of trauma, particularly the Holocaust, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York and London: Routledge, 1992); Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999); and Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. and ed. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Anton Kaes, “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination,” History and Memory 2, no. 1 (1990): 111–29; Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996).

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For a discussion of sociological approaches to collective memory see Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40. For a critique of some sociological theories of collective memory see Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, “Collective Memory – What Is It?” History and Memory 8, no. 1 (1996): 30–50. For a sociological approach in an analysis of collective memory in Israel, see Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995). Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 187. See especially Sigmund Freud, “Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics,” Standard Edition 8: 1–161; “Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays,” Standard Edition 23: 1–137. Ibid., 94. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003). Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). On Israeli society as post-traumatic see Amos Goldberg, Introduction to Writing History, Writing Trauma, by Dominick LaCapra [in Hebrew], trans. Yaniv Pharkas (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2005), 7–27; Nitzan S. Ben-Shaul, Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997). Marianne Hirsch, “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 8. Ibid., 9. In this context, see also Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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Gertz, Nurith and George Khlefi. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Goldberg, Amos. Introduction to Writing History, Writing Trauma, by Dominick LaCapra, 7–27 [in Hebrew]. Translated by Yaniv Pharkas. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2005. Hacking, Ian. “The Making and Molding of Child Abuse.” Critical Inquiry 17 (Winter 1991): 253–88. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Translated and edited by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Hirsch, Joshua. Afterimage: Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. —. “Projected Memory: Holocaust Photographs in Personal and Public Fantasy.” In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, 3–23. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999. Hobsbawm, Eric and Terence Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Kaes, Anton. “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination.” History and Memory 2, no. 1 (1990): 111–29. Kaes, Anton. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Kaplan, E. Ann and Ban Wang, eds. Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Karnac Books, 1973. Leys, Ruth. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. —. Trauma: A Genealogy. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000. Loshitzky, Yosefa. Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2001. Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. London: Routledge, 2008.

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Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. Meek, Allen. Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images. London: Routledge, 2010. Morag, Raya. Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War. Bruxelles: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009. Ne’eman, Judd. “The Death Mask of the Moderns: A Genealogy of New Sensibility Cinema in Israel.” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 100–28. Netanyahu, Benjamin. Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. Olick, Jeffrey K. and Joyce Robbins. “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40. Radstone, Susannah, ed. Memory and Methodology. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Translated by Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970. Said, Edward W. Freud and the Non-European. London: Verso, 2003. Sarkar, Bhaskar and Janet Walker, eds. Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering. London: Routledge, 2010. Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992. Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge, 1989. Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. —. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996. Yosef, Raz. The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2011. Yosef, Raz, ed. Special Issue: History and Memory in Israeli Cinema. Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel—History, Society, Culture [in Hebrew] 14 (2008). Young, Allan. The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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Postscript to Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation Ella Shohat

The Arab-Jew and the inscription of memory Recent years have seen a renaissance of Mizrahi and/or Arab-Jewish cultural practices related to identity and belonging. These practices too must be seen against the backdrop of contested histories and terminologies. The identity crisis provoked by the rupture of Jews from their largely Arab/Muslim countries is reflected in a terminological crisis in which no single term seems to fully represent a coherent entity. The very proliferation of terms suggests the enormous difficulties of grappling with the complexities of this identity. To name a few: “Sephardim,” “Jews of Islam,” “Arab-Jews,” “Jewish-Arabs,” “Middle Eastern Jews,” “Asian and African Jews,” “Non-European Jews,” “Third World Jews,” “Levantine Jews,” “Bnei Edot Ha-Mizrah” (descendents of the Eastern communities), “Blacks,” “Mizrahim” (Easterners), or “Iraqi-Jews,” “Moroccan Jews,” “Iranian-Jews,” “Kurdish-Jews,” “Turkish Jews,” “Palestinian Jews,” and so-forth. Each term raises questions about the implicit discursive politics that both generated the terms and made them catchwords at specific conjunctures. Each term encodes a historical, geographical, and political point-of-view. Prior to their arrival in Israel, Jews in Iraq, for example, regarded themselves as Jews but within a diacritical identity that played off and depended on a relation to other communities. Within a transregional space that extended from the Atlantic through the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, Jews retained a Jewishness that was culturally and socially interwoven into Islamic civilization. Shaped by Arab-Muslim culture, more specifically, they also helped shape that culture, in a dialogical process that generated their Judeo-Arab identity. The proliferating

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hyphens, in this sense, highlight a complexly embedded identity that must be articulated in relation to multiple communities and geographies. The rise of Zionism and Arab nationalism, along with the implementation of partitions as a colonial solution for regional conflicts, inevitably impacted the identity designations of Jews in the Arab Muslim world. Arabness came to signify a national identity, requiring a realignment of Ottoman definitions. Their religion (Judaism) rapidly became a national marker in the international arena, conflicting with their Arab civilizational belonging. They have come to occupy an ambivalent position vis-à-vis both Zionism and Arab nationalism. The explosive political situation subsequent to the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel produced a new context, rendering their existence in Arab countries virtually impossible. Upon arrival in Israel, Arab-Jews entered a new linguistic/discursive paradigm, shaped by geo-political (the Israel/Arab conflict), legal (Israeli citizenship), and cultural (East versus West) forces. The normative term became “Israeli,” not merely a signifier of a new passport, but also an indicator of a new cultural and ideological formation. Whereas Jewishness in Arab/Muslim spaces formed part of a constellation of coexisting and complexly stratified ethnicities and religions, Jewishness in Israel was now the assumed cultural/political “dominant.” Arabness became the marginalized category, while the religion of Arab-Jews, for the first time in their history, came to be affiliated with the dominant state power and attuned to the very basis of national belonging. Their cultural Arabness, meanwhile, was transformed into an embarrassing excess, a marker of ethnic, even racial, otherness. If in the Arab world, it was their Jewishness (associated now with Zionism) that was subjected to surveillance, in Israel, it was their affiliation with an Arab cultural geography that was similarly disciplined and punished. The processes of spatial rupture and cultural displacement, in this sense, have impacted and shifted the identity labels. Each term, then, gives expression to a different historical moment, geographical space, and ideological perspective. Each calls attention to a different dimension of a complex socio-historical and spatial trajectory, foregrounding specific aspects of communal affiliation. Each suggests a frame that illuminates only partial aspects of overlapping itineraries shaped within the movement across borders. Each addresses specific and even contradictory dynamics between and within different world zones. Another aspect of this terminological problematic is how to verbally convey the unprecedented movement across borders of West Asian/North African Jews in the wake of the partition of Palestine. Nationalist paradigms cannot capture the

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ambivalence of this historical movement, particularly for Arab-Jews. Given the idiosyncratic situation of a community trapped between two nationalisms—Arab and Jewish—each term used to designate the displacement seems problematic. Terms such as “Aliya” (ascendancy), “yetzia” (exit), “exodus,” “expulsion,” “immigration,” “emigration,” “exile,” “refugees,” “ex-patriots,” and “population exchange” do not seem adequate. In the case of the Palestinians, forced into a mass exodus, the term “refugee” is appropriate since they never wanted to leave Palestine and have steadfastly nourished the desire to return. In the case of Arab-Jews, the question of will, desire, and agency remains highly ambiguous. It is not only a matter of legal definition of citizenship that is at stake, but also mental maps of belonging within the context of rival nationalisms. Did Arab-Jews want to stay? Did they want to leave? If so, did they want to leave for Israel or elsewhere? Did they exercise free will in deciding to leave? Once in Israel, did they want to go elsewhere, or go back to their countries of origin? Were they able to do so? And did they regret the impossibility of returning? Different answers to these questions imply distinct assumptions about agency, memory, and space. The official term “Aliya”(ascent), meanwhile, is multiply misleading. It suggests a commitment to Zionism, when, in fact, the majority of Jews—and certainly Jews within the Levant—were hardly Zionists in the modern nationalist sense of the word. Zionist discourse normalizes the telos of a Jewish nation-state; any move toward its borders is represented as the ultimate Jewish act. When the actual departure of Arab-Jews is represented on the screen, it is usually narrated as an act of devotion. In the controversial TV series produced for Israel’s fiftieth anniversary, Tkuma, images of Yemeni Jews arriving at the camps set up by the Jewish Agency are juxtaposed with a voice-over that reductively speaks of persecution and Messianic will.1 The Yemeni Jews are represented as voluntarily crossing the desert and sacrificing their lives to get to the Promised Land, which the film implicitly equates with the state of Israel. Zionist writings often naturalize the inevitability of this destination while erasing the diverse Zionist tactics to actively dislodge these communities, including false wrappings of the nation-state with the “coming of the Messiah.” This Aliya metanarrative at times is axiomatically assumed even within revisionist films, as when David Belhassen and Asher Hemias’s documentary The Ringworm Children begins its arrival story with a voice-over that describes “the wave of massive Aliya knocking on the gates of the land.” Critical films, such as David Benchetrit’s epic scale documentary Kaddim Wind: Moroccan Chronicles (2002), rewrite the foundational Aliya discourse. The

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film begins with the Moroccan national anthem on the sound track, thereby acoustically counteracting the assumption that Moroccan Jews by definition belonged to Israel. Through the archival footage of departing vehicles, we glimpse the moment of rupture for Moroccan Jews, narrated with an almost dirge-like elegy. The testimonial interviews with diverse Moroccan-Israelis address their confused reasons for moving to Israel, which for the most part do not reflect a Zionist desire, as well as their initial traumatic encounters with the Ashkenazi-dominated Israeli apparatus. Whether through archival material or contemporary interviews, the film, in a kind of a double movement, interweaves nostalgic memories of the Moroccan past with the shock of arrival in Israel. Deconstructing the metanarrative of modernization, revisionist cinema fills in an important representational gap—the challenge of being at once of the larger Middle East and living within the boundaries of Israel. Instead of constituting merely a euphoric beginning of modern Jewish life, here Israel constitutes a topos of loss, including the loss of Jewishness as lived and known before the arrival of Zionism in the region. Critical Mizrahi work has called attention to the chasm between official discourse and the actual experiences of Middle Eastern Jews, both in terms of the before and the after of their arrival in Israel. (Here I use Mizrahi less in the sense of origins and more in the sense of conveying a critical perspective.) Revisionist films do not view Arab-Muslim spaces through the prism of pogroms and the Holocaust; instead, they interrogate the dominant paradigms. Some even go as far as to articulate the latent “what ifs” of history, expressing a forbidden desire for a lost Arab homeland. A few documentaries capture moments where interviewees express regret over their destination to and in Israel, or reveal, however unrealistically, a desire to return. An unofficial chronicle of Moroccan Jews, Kaddim Wind orchestrates a polyphonic conversation with a variety of interviewees from the Moroccan-Israeli political spectrum, including politicians, activists, writers, scholars, and religious leaders, such as Erez Bitton, Reuven Abergel, Shlomo Ben Ami, Arieh Der‘i, Sami Shalom Chetrit, and Ovad Aboutbul, who arrived in Israel at a young age. Diverse in terms of class, status, occupation, and residency, as well as in terms of ideological perspectives, they all recount a traumatic first encounter with Israel and an ongoing struggle for equality. A deep nostalgia for Morocco is often expressed, and at times, even moving toward a beyond-the-pale potential affiliation with Palestinians and Palestine. One sequence, shot in the moshav town Mevasseret Zion, near Jerusalem, follows homeless families and squatters protesting discriminatory policies in land and

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housing. They report having asked for asylum from Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority in Jericho. Benny Torati’s Barzent Roofs (1994), meanwhile, documents a southern Tel Aviv tent “settlement” camp protesting housing policies and angrily promising an “Intifada” (using the Arabic word in Hebrew) worse than the Palestinian Intifada. (That one-and-a-half-year-long protest, like many, was completely crushed.) In these instances, “Palestine” signifies crossing the outer limits of a licensed imaginary; it points to an emotional exhaustion point, to the failure to contain Mizrahi anger and a refusal to be “bad children,” and to evoke Golda Meir’s 1970s condescending phrase about the Black Panthers. The Mizrahi/Palestinian nexus is explored in Nizar Hassan and Danae Elon’s documentary Cut (2000), which recounts the 1950s settlement of the Palestinian village ‘Agur with largely Kurdish Jews from Iraq and Turkey. The residents describe the reasons for their departure for Israel: “It was not Zionism; it was religion, and therefore we kissed the earth.” When Hassan asks if they wish to return, they respond that their Iraqi departure document stated “Roha bala Rag‘a” (in Arabic, “leaving without returning”). In fact, the Laissez-Passer issued by the Iraqi monarchy stated: “La yasmah lihamilihi bil‘awda ila al-Iraq batatan,” or the (document) holder is not permitted to return definitively. Yet, the interviewee’s rendering of the Laissez-Passer’s idiom as a colloquial expression, “roha bala raj‘a,” actually a curse, echoes the morbid sentiment around departure. At the same time, one of the residents admits with visible emotion: “To return would have been the greatest pleasure of my life . . . but to live there, I wouldn’t want it. Can’t even think of it. . . . It’s impossible to leave. To visit, I did visit. My uncle who converted to Islam became the Sheikh of the village. . . . I visited the grave of my father.” Throughout, the film captures an existence caught between the anxieties of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, on the one hand, and Arab spaces of nostalgia, on the other. On the soundtrack the contemporary moment is largely evoked by the Iraqi music of Ilham Al Madfai, who emerged onto the music scene almost two decades after the departure of Iraqi Jews. Syncretizing traditional Iraqi songs with jazz and salsa, the film’s non-diegetic music invokes Iraq in the past and present tenses. The soundtrack registers multiple dislocations and exoduses from Iraq (Al Madfai has been residing in Jordan), producing diverse Iraqi diasporic syncretisms. At the same time, Israel/Palestine is evoked through the recurrent sounds and images of military helicopters. Under the shadow of the conflict, the residents recall their desperate struggle to survive in Israel: hunger, joblessness, crowded shacks, lack of electricity, protests and clashes with police, along with fatal confrontation with “mistanenim” / “fida’iyun.” Symptomatically,

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they oscillate between Hebrew and Arabic when they refer to the Palestinians who crossed back across the borders, whom the Israelis called “infiltrators” and the Palestinians, “men of sacrifice” or “freedom fighters”—an instability having to do with the anxiety of either Israeli or Palestinian addressees. Partly narrated in Arabic, using Arabic text in the prelude and deploying Arabic subtitles throughout, Cut attempts to mediate the story of Arab-Jews for Palestinians in Israel. The filmmakers, furthermore, incorporate their own presence into the story, addressing the residents’ anxiety concerning the filming. Hassan challenges the interviewees when they use the Hebrew pronunciation “‘Agur” (pronounced with a hard “g”) to refer to their moshav, reminding them that prior to filming they consistently used the Arabic name “‘agur” (pronounced with a soft “g”). The presence of non-Mizrahi filmmakers, it could be argued, provokes Mizrahim to become self-aware and relay the official discourse, virtually performing docile citizenship. Numerous anti-occupation films use the hostile dark faces of Mizrahim to represent the oppressive nature of occupation. Their aggressivity toward the interrogative camera and their hand covering the lens tend to underline the Euro-Israeli image of Mizrahi fanaticism or even fascism. Yet, without idealizing Mizrahim—or any community, for that matter— what such representations do not acknowledge is the underlying Mizrahi class/ ethnic hostility to the privileged Euro-Israeli filmmaker, whose camera, car, and body-language communicate an assumed authority or entitlement over the space. Such tensions go unmarked in such anti-occupation documentaries as Amos Gitai’s Field Diary (1982), where the soldier-filmmaker friction is framed as merely about the occupation, between the enlightened camera and the (dark) forces that shut its view. Cut, in contrast, reflexively narrates a triangular encounter between a Euro-Israeli filmmaker (Elon) and a Palestinian filmmaker (Hassan), on the one hand, and Arab-Jews, on the other. It calls attention to the process—from the suspicion with which the filmmakers are greeted to their bonding with some of the interviewees. The film itself relays an edifying story of building trust—of hopeful possibilities and anxious impossibilities. Thus, while subjectivizing the Mizrahim, Cut ends with an appreciation of the limits of trust in the war zone. The concluding acknowledgment—“This film would not have been possible without the love and the trust of ‘Agur’s residents”—is cut short by the aggressive acoustic and visual presence of the military helicopters. The interviews with Arab-Jews in Route 181, similarly, reveal an intricate relationship to Israel/Palestine on the part of individuals entangled in a war situation but also imbued with memories of life in the Arab world. In the “North”

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chapter, the filmmakers interview North Africans, who speak of a Moroccan or Tunisian past, which would seem out-of-place given their fraught situation near the Lebanese border. A Tunisian woman, who lost a son in a war, expresses a longing for her former life in Tunisia, thus illuminating the Arab/Jewish interfaces that were much more likely before 1948. The Iraqi-Jews in Samir’s Forget Baghdad, similarly, some of whom were communists in Iraq and never actually intended to move to Israel, shed light on the circumstances that dislocated them, asserting that Israel would not have been their preferred destination had there been other options. Indeed, the writer Samir Naqqash stubbornly continued to write his novels in Arabic even after moving to Israel, crafting a heteroglossic array of Iraqi ethnic, religious, and regional dialects, while Sami Michael and Shimon Ballas shifted to Hebrew, but continued to write about Iraq or about Iraqis in Israel. Set in Iraq, the protagonists of Michael’s A Handful of Fog are communists who belong to diverse ethnicities and religions. Ballas’s Outcast, meanwhile, recounts the case of a Jewish-Iraqi scholar who stayed in Baghdad after the Jewish community’s departure and converted to Islam.2 The treatment of the Arab-Jew in literature and cinema thus offers the reader/spectator an imaginary voyage into the past, prior to the severing of the Arab-Jewish body, and hints at the possibility of reclaiming the Arab Jew for a reconfigured future. “Arab” and “Jew” are revealed to be contingent signifiers rather than essential categories. Home and homelessness, meanwhile, do not coincide neatly with the boundaries of the nation-state or with official documents of citizenship. The figure of the Arab Jew, in this sense, transcends past fixities and blurs contemporary boundaries. Above and beyond the initial rupture, whether contested, mourned, or celebrated, recent displacements represent an end to an era that elicits potential allegorical readings of the earlier displacement. The representation of recent dislocation poses a retroactive question of whether Jews could, should, or would have remained in the Arabic/Muslim world. Against the backdrop of the “return from exile” operation, which brought elderly Iraqi Jews to Israel following the outbreak of the Iraq War, Inigo Gilmore’s The Last Jews of Babylon (2003) tells the story of 85-year-old Ezra Levy’s journey from Iraq to Israel. In Baghdad, where he feels at home in his spacious house, he longs for his family and for his lost love Daisy, whom he last saw more than 50 years ago, with the departure of the majority Jewish population. The cross-border move that began with the excitement of reunification ends with an elderly man alone in his narrow living quarter, visibly depressed. In one sequence, Ezra visits an Israeli school, where he answers (in English) rather prejudicial questions about Iraq. A sense

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of alienation emerges even with the Iraqi-Israelis, the decades of separation lived in different worlds having created a gap that seems unbridgeable. Through Ezra’s unique perspective, the spectator reflects on the measure and the degree of the acculturation of his old Iraqi acquaintances in Israel. Whereas he had lived as a Jewish minority in a Muslim space, Ezra begins to live as an Iraqi minority in a Jewish state. In Israel, his joyful moments are visible in Palestinian spaces; in a Jaffah café or at a Palestinian wedding, dancing to Arab music. While the film revolves around the theme of Aliya, it does not replicate the Aliya discourse, performing neither the rescue of the Baghdadi Jew, nor the happy end of a homecoming among fellow Jews, even, for that matter, with fellow Iraqi Jews. Such narratives of rupture diverge from the more paradigmatic films on the same theme. In Sallah Shabbati, we may recall, the spectator was first introduced to the Oriental Jew, Sallah, when he and his family descend from the airplane, landing in Israel. He comes from the Levant, but within the film’s Eurocentric imaginary mapping, he comes from nowhere: first, in the literal sense, since his place of origin remains unknown; and second, in the metaphorical sense, since Asian and African geographies are suggested to amount to nothing of substance. While the protagonist’s Levantine essence forms the dynamic center of the narrative, his Levantine geography is crucially invisible. Sallah’s physical presence in Israel only embodies that geography’s absence and highlights the process of erasure. Within Zionist discourse, Jews from West Asia/North Africa arrive from obscure corners of the globe to Israel, the Promised Land, to which they have always already been destined. Mizrahim are thus claimed as part of a continuous Jewish history/geography whose alpha and omega is the Land of Israel. While superimposing a nationalist discourse on the messianic idea of Jewish revival, Zionist ideologues, especially in the wake of the physical transfer of Palestinians to Arab countries, sought the transfer of Jews from Arab/Muslim countries to Palestine. However, for the displaced Jews, physical dislocation was to be accompanied by a metamorphosis. The establishment, in a contemporary retelling of the biblical Exodus from Egypt, called for “the death of the desert generation,” in order to facilitate their birth as the New Jews-Israelis, embodied by the Sabra generation. The question of continuity and discontinuity is central, therefore, to the Zionist vision of the nation-state. Yet, one could argue that by provoking the geographical dispersal of Middle Eastern/Arab-Jews, by placing them in a new situation “on the ground,” by attempting to reshape their identity as simply “Israeli,” by disdaining and trying to uproot their Arabness, and by racializing them and discriminating

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against them as a group—the Zionist project of the in-gathering of exiles itself provoked a dislocation that resulted in traumatic ruptures and exilic identity formations. The Israeli establishment obliged Arab-Jews to redefine themselves in relation to new ideological paradigms and polarities, thus provoking the aporias of an identity constituted out of its own ruins. The Jews within Islam had thought of themselves as Jews, but that Jewishness was interwoven within a larger Judeo-Islamic cultural geography. Under pressure from Zionism, on the one hand, and Arab nationalism, on the other, that set of affiliations gradually changed, resulting in a transformed cultural semantics.

The Mizrahi cinema of displacement In a roundabout way, the Mizrahim as “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson) constitute, at least in part, a Zionist invention. The Mizrahi identity is, then, on one level, one of Zionism’s unintended consequences, one that marks a certain departure from previous Jewish cultural geographies. Yet, the delegitimization of Middle Eastern culture has also resulted in a new identity formation, shaped out of the shards of a non-European past, which brought together a massive encounter among Arab, Iranian, Turkish, Kurdish, Berber, Indian, Georgian, and Ethiopian cultures. From Jews of such diverse regions as the Maghreb and Yemen has emerged a new overarching umbrella identity, what began to be called in the late 1980s “the Mizrahim.” The term “Mizrahim,” I have suggested elsewhere, condenses a number of connotations: it celebrates the Jewish past in the Eastern world; it affirms the pan-Oriental communities developed in Israel itself; and it invokes a future of revived cohabitation with the Arab Muslim East. All these emergent collective definitions arose, as often occurs, in diacritical contrast with a newly encountered hegemonic group, in this case the Ashkenazim of Israel. Indeed, the cultural productions of the decade following the publication of Israeli Cinema authorize us to speak of an emergent Mizrahi culture, including an emergent Mizrahi cinema. Critical Mizrahi cultural practices—including by non-Mizrahim but from a decidedly Mizrahi perspective—not only revisit hegemonic narratives of the Sephardi/Ashkenazi ethnic tension, but also confront core questions of identity and historical memory. Mizrahi films have given voice to a different perspective, closer to that developed in critical scholarship, which has denaturalized the view of the terms “Jew” and “Arab” as mutually exclusive and inimical identities.

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Instead, the Arab-versus-Jew binary opposition is re-presented within the hyphenated space of the “Arab-Jew.” No longer an uncanny figure, the Arab-Jew here is a speaking voice and body that must be reckoned with. Many of these films deal with linguistic quandaries, especially concerning the relationship between Arabic and Hebrew as well as between Mizrahi culture and the Middle East. Numerous autobiographical films write, voice, and “image” what was earlier marginalized and de-legitimized. If within Zionist discourse the Arab-Jew was delinked from Arab history to be claimed as part of “the (Jewish) Nation,” recent cultural practices re-link Mizrahim to Arabic and Middle Eastern cultural geography. They negotiate the imposed dilemma of choosing between Jewishness and Arabness in a geopolitical context that has perpetuated the equation between Arabness, Middle Easternness, and Islam, on the one hand, and between Jewishness, Europeanness, and Westernness, on the other. Whereas orientalist ethnographic cinema has often conveyed a folkloristic and miserablist picture of Jews in the Muslim world, revisionist Arab-Jewish/Mizrahi cultural practices have undermined these exotic tropes and rescue narratives. The penchant for conjuring up urban spaces belonging to the Arab-Jewish past—Baghdad, Tunis, Alexandria, Beirut, Aleppo, Tangier, and Algiers—can be read in relation to the homogenizing narrative of the universal Jewish ghetto, as well as in relation to the rural reductionism of the Middle East as a whole. A number of historical documentaries, auto/biographical films, memoirs, novels, visual productions, and performance pieces recall, often against the grain of Zionist ideology, a presumably “alien” and “distant” geography. Despite occasional traces of self-exoticization, Mizrahi cultural practices have begun to embark on introspective voyages into a multifaceted “East.” It is not that the Mizrahi/ Euro-Israeli axis is eliminated, as much as it sidestepped, pushed to the periphery of the narrative, informing it as an assumed backdrop. Such a representational move can be considered a form of a conceptual return to a pre-Israel world of wider horizons, a geocultural domain stretched from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, where Jews traveled and exchanged ideas under the aegis of a largely Muslim world.3 The rather anomalous nature of “the departure” and “the entry” has generated narratives preoccupied with dislocation and the inscription of memory. The cross-border imaginary can be found even in films made by non-Mizrahi or non-Jewish filmmakers, such as Samir’s Forget Baghdad, Suleiman’s Homage by Assassination, Inigo Gilmore’s The Last Jews of Babylon, and Florence Straus’s Between Two Notes, all of which chronicle life in the in-between of hostile political camps.

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Recent Mizrahi cultural practices invoke Arabic or Middle Eastern culture as inhabiting the present-day Mizrahi body, liminally figuring life on the edge of the intimate and the distant, of home and exile, state citizenship, and cultural belonging. The question of the Arabic language—a mother tongue for Arab-Jews but also Israel’s enemy language—has thus become a metonym and metaphor for the displacement. Arabic, in this context, is not merely a language but a trope that evokes the dilemmas of continuity and discontinuity between past and present where one’s previous homeland has become the enemy of the current one. In contrast to Mizrahi literature, where Hebrew occasionally stands in for Arabic, and where Arabic phrases are sometimes written in Hebrew script, cinema as a multitrack medium has made it possible for Arabic to neighbor and intersect with Hebrew—both written and spoken. The celluloid inscription of Arabic, along with Mizrahi accented Hebrew, relocates the Mizrahim within cultural contexts and historical moments that transcend nation-state boundaries. Unlike literary texts, films allow for the literal registry of the multiplicity of dialects in Israel and the diversity of Mizrahi and non-Ashkenazi accents in Hebrew (inflected not only by Arabic but also by other tongues, such as Turkish, Farsi, Ladino, Georgian, and Amharic). Mizrahi cinema, in this sense, tends to deploy a multi-accentual soundtrack. The broken Hebrew of the older generation and the broken Arabic of the younger generation no longer signifies inferiority, but rather a culturally dense fault-line existence. (At times, a single sentence features multiple languages, rendered comprehensible with the help of subtitles). Eschewing the generic “mark of the plural,” Mizrahi cinema thus orchestrates the variety of Mizrahi voices, invoking multiple geographies and diverse classes. Mizrahi subaltern proletarians, without access to upwardly mobile institutional spaces, gain access to a space of representation. Repressed memories, whether of Muslim spaces or of the immediate aftermath of the arrival to Israel, are reenacted and documented, generating a new Mizrahi testimonial cinema. In a vital audio-visual revisionist project, critical cinema revisits the literal polyglossia that informs the intricate social-cultural space of Israel/Palestine. The Mizrahi project of reclaiming “Arabness” and “Easternness,” whatever its political implications, has cumulatively redefined the cultural parameters of an Israel that is no longer merely a prolongation of Europe, “in” but not “of ” the Middle East. Over the past decade, Mizrahi literature and cinema of the second and third generation have been engaging the departure from the Arab world and the move to Israel, whether in semi-autobiographical fiction or in autobiographical documentaries. Duki Dror’s My Fantasia (2001) traces the story

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of the filmmaker’s family in Iraq and Israel using the family’s Hanukia menorah workshop as a backdrop for probing conversations. Rami Kimchi’s Cinema Egypt cites Egyptian cinema to rekindle memories of a lost Egyptian past that, nonetheless, continues to survive in present-day Israel. Interviewing his mother about her life in Egypt and in Israel, Kimchi screens her one of her favorite Egyptian films Leila the Village Girl (1941), directed by the Jewish-Egyptian Togo Mizrahi, and starring the Jewish-Egyptian movie star, Leila Mourad. These autobiographical documentaries go down film’s memory lane, as it were, in order to paint a cosmopolitan portrait of Egypt. (Other films, meanwhile, recount literal return journeys. In Duki Dror’s Taqasim, the Egyptian Israeli musicians visit their old Cairo neighborhood and friends, while in Asher de Bentolila Tlalim’s Exile, the filmmaker returns to Morocco to the family’s house in Tangier. Return, whether literal or symbolic, has become a common motif, within a process of reflection triggered by the search for “roots.”) Documentaries such as Eyal Halfon’s Chalrie Baghdad (2003) and Duki Dror’s Taqasim and Café Noah are devoted to the music of the dislocated generation, specifically the story of Arab-Jewish musicians who ended up in a country that disdained their Arabic music, denying them access to funding and public outlets. While Taqasim follows the voyage of the musician Felix Mizrahi to Cairo where he grew up, Café Noah tells the story of the consumption of Arabic music in Israel by Arab-Jews throughout the 1950s and 1960s.Other films, meanwhile, shed light on Arab-Jewish writers and Mizrahi literature, delving into the linguistic rupture for writers whose mother tongue was Arabic. David Benchetrit’s documentary, Samir (1997), focuses on the Iraqi-Israeli writer Sami Michael, who, along with other writers such as Shimon Ballas, made a conscious decision to shift from writing in Arabic to writing in Hebrew, while Samir Naqqash, as we have seen, continued to write in Arabic. The homage to Sami Michael attempts to recuperate the place of the Arab-Jewish/Mizrahi writer within the Hebrew literary canon. The surge in memoirs and personal essays, in autobiographical and diary documentaries, and in the performing and visual arts’ incorporation of familial memorabilia must all be seen as part of a desire to reconfigure a conflictual Mizrahi identity.4 Films such as Simone Bitton’s Yoredet, Yochi Dadon-Spigel’s Gifted (2000), Serge Ankri’s Mama’s Couscous (1994), Sini Bar David’s The South—Alice Never Lived Here (1998), David Benchetrit’s Kaddim Wind, Rami Kimchi’s Cinema Egypt and Father Language (2006), Sigalit Banai’s Mama Faiza, Duki Dror’s My Fantasia, Sarit Haymian’s Gole Sangam (2007) “out,” as it were, the formerly closeted Arab, Iranian, Sephardi, or syncretic Mizrahi cultures,

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which had been rejected and therefore confined to the private sphere of home. Even mundane activities, such as cooking, singing, and dancing, form part of an effort to recuperate rejected home culture associated with “the enemy” across the border. Such films explore, often through a cross-generational encounter, the fault line between the Arabic/Middle-Eastern world of the parents’ generation and that of their now adult children shaped by new Israeli cultural paradigms. Mama Faiza, for example, follows the case of Faiza Rushdi, an Egyptian-Jewish singer, who continues to sing in Arabic in Israel, accompanied by Arab-Jewish musicians. This story is filtered through the daughter, the actress Yaffa Tusia Cohen, who is shown not only in her everyday life but also on stage, where she offers a wrenching theatrical version of their intergenerational relationship. Mizrahi narratives dissect the pain of dislocation that had been kept until recently in the shadows of an Euro-Israeli facade. Sini Bar David’s The South offers an introspective voyage through the story of the dislocations of the filmmaker’s grandmother, who reflects on a communal history that spans cross-border movements between Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria after World War II and Nazi deportations, ending in Israel, in a south Tel Aviv neighborhood bordering on the mixed Jewish/Arab city of Jaffa. In the slum, in the morbid vicinity of Tel Kabir’s Forensic Institute, the grandmother lives a confined existence, echoed by both Bar-David’s own childhood experiences and those of the present-day younger generation. Slow-motion sequences at the beginning and the end portray a young girl playing hopscotch and jumping rope in an empty street full of shuttered storefronts. A no-exit situation is also portrayed in films made by non-Israeli Arab-Jews; for example, in Mary Halawani’s I Miss the Sun, which tells the story of the filmmaker’s Egyptian-Jewish grandmother, chronicling the exodus from sunny Egypt in 1956 to grim Brooklyn, where the Passover ritual of commemorating the biblical Exodus clashes with the grandmother’s deep sense of loss and of missing Egypt. Nostalgia and claustrophobia are intimately linked in Arab-Jewish exilic narratives. Other films have addressed not only the dislocation to Israel but also the subsequent emigration from Israel. Amit Goren’s 66 Was a Good Year for Tourism (1992) reflects on the fragmented identity of a family, given disagreements about this emigration, especially between the Egyptian Israeli father, content in the United States, and the Ashkenazi Israeli mother, who resents their departure from Israel. Yael Bitton’s The Rabbi’s 12 Children (2007), meanwhile, chronicles the dispersal of the filmmaker’s family from Morocco to Israel, and then to Switzerland and the United States. From the interviews and the domestic ambience, there

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emerges a portrait of their disparate trajectories that elicit a comparative reading of the siblings as a social microcosm. The stark class contrast, manifested not only in economics but also in vocabulary, expressiveness, confidence, and body language, between family members living in Israel and those in Switzerland and the United States, becomes a social document and a celluloid allegory for the “descent” of Arab-Jews into Israel. Rather than a telos, Israel here is only one station, however crucial, in the fragmented story of Jewish-Moroccan diaspora. For Mizrahim, the Israeli experience has not been conducive to success. Many families who led prosperous lives in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, or Tunisia encountered a social crisis in Israel. In a short period, the identity of Middle Eastern Jews was fractured, their life possibilities diminished, their hopes deferred. In the Mizrahi cinema of displacement, thus, the question of memory is embedded in a sense of geographical dislocation, of loss without gain. What may be termed Mizrahi displacement cinema relays a skeptical or ambivalent relation to the official account, disrupting its totalizing coherence through a paradoxical poetics of exile in the Promised Land. In many ways, such cultural practices, in tandem with sociopolitical struggle, point to a dystopian take on the utopian project of the “ingathering of Exiles.” Euro-Israeli ideologues promoted the myth of the melting pot in the wake of mass Aliya in the 1950s and 1960s, but cultural mixing did not take place exactly in the ways foreseen and imagined by the dominant Euro-Israeli institutions. In the working class neighborhoods, Mizrahim of Arab or Turkish or Iranian origin acquired new multiplicities, the product of a new historical encounter of cultures. They quickly learned slang and recipes from other “Oriental” countries. While they experienced delegitimization by Euro-Israel, they were also only marginally connected to an Arab world that knew little of their new existence. In Mizrahi neighborhoods in the 1950s and 1960s, the radio dial was turned to Arab music. They continued to listen to Umm Kulthum and Nazim al-Ghazali, and, in the age of television, especially since the 1970s, when Mizrahim en masse began purchasing TV sets, they viewed Arabic programs and films from within cramped living rooms. Hybrid identities cannot be reduced to a fixed recipe; rather, they form a changing repertory of cultural modalities. Occupying contradictory social and discursive spaces, the Mizrahi identity, like all identities, is dynamic and mobile, less an achieved synthesis than an unstable constellation of discourses. Mizrahi popular culture has clearly manifested a vibrant dialogue with Arab, Turkish, Greek, Indian, and Iranian popular cultures. Despite the separation from the Arab world, Mizrahi culture has been nourished through the enthusiastic

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consumption of Egyptian, Jordanian, and Lebanese television programs, films, and music video performances that have ruptured the Euro-Israeli public sphere in a kind of subliminal transgression of forbidden reminiscences. In fact, some Mizrahi music is produced in collaboration with (Israeli) Palestinians, as is the case with the musicians working with Yair Dalal. The Moroccan-Israeli musical group Sfatayim was one of the first to travel back to Morocco to produce a music video sung in Moroccan Arabic against the scenery of the cities and villages that Moroccan Jews have left behind, just as Israeli-born Iraqi singers, such as Ya‘aqub Nishawi, sing old and contemporary Iraqi music. This yearning for a symbolic return “to the Diaspora” results in an ironic reversal of the conventional narrative of “next year in Jerusalem,” as well as a reversal of the biblical expression that substitutes “Babylon” for “Zion”: “By the waters of Zion, where we sat down, and there we wept, when we remembered Babylon.” Over the past decade, critical Mizrahi voices have become more audible in the public sphere. The “periphery” has come to occupy center stage, whether in social documentaries such as Benny Torati’s Barzent Roofs, Rino Tzror Doron Tsabari’s Underdogs: A War Movie (1996), Amit Goren’s 6 Open, 21 Closed (1994), or in autobiographical quest and personal diary films, Duki Dror’s My Fantasia, Ronen Amar’s My Family’s Pizza (2003), and Assaf Basson’s Maktub Aleik: A Voice without a Face (2005), or in fictional allegories such as Meital Abikasis’s White Walls (2005), Benny Zada’s Hamara (1999), and Aya Somech’s Questions of a Dead Worker (2002). The documentary series A Sea of Tears (1999), directed by Ron Kahlili, founder of the Mizrahi TV Channel, Briza, reclaims the place of the hybrid Mizrahi music produced in Israel by the younger generation of the immigrants’ children.5 Recounting the history of Mizrahi music, the series links the emergence of music to a broader sociopolitical context, addressing the institutional discrimination practiced by Israeli radio and TV. One of the interviewees, the singer Nissim Sarrousi, recalls one of the most visible public encounters between Euro-Israel and Sephardic Israel on the only state-controlled TV channel. In an interview that took place in 1974, the host of the “Tandu” show, Yaron London, insulted the music, the voice, the singing, the dress, the looks, and even the shoes of the singer Sarousi—a traumatic moment engraved in the Mizrahi consciousness as a humiliation for all Mizrahim. In A Sea of Tears, Sarrousi recounts his visceral response to this interview, which was to immediately leave Israel for France. Narrated by the activist Tikva Levi, A Sea of Tears offers an embrace of the rejected singers, in an act of legitimation of Mizrahi music and, allegorically, of the Mizrahi identity.

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Such a retrospective look links present-day Mizrahi investments in the past to earlier manifestations of cross-border affinities, already found not only in the cinema (George Ovadia’s films, which, unlike most Bourekas films, dedicated less narrative space to ethnic tensions), but also in music (The Natural Alternative and Sfatayim), literature (Gavriel Ben Simhon, Erez Bitton, and Shelly Elkayam), magazines and newspapers (HaPaamon, Iton Aher, Hapatish, and Hila News), socio-political spaces (Kivun Hadash, documented in the Eli Hamo’s New Direction, 1989), and movements throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (East for Peace, The Oriental Front, and Perspectives Judeo-arabes), which dealt not only with political issues but also with their cultural dimension.6 Like Mizrahi music, George Ovadia’s Bourekas cinema was often marginalized and publicly excoriated as “vulgar.” In fiction films, several Mizrahi filmmakers, most notably Yamin Messika and Benny Torati, have revisited Bourekas cinema in homage to a genre that offered—whatever its limitations—second-generation Mizrahim a space for identity-formation. In the wake of Ovadia’s work, Torati’s Desperado Square cleanses the genre, as it were, of its ethnic conflict, centering on a Mizrahi “periphery” oblivious to Euro-Israel. The film’s ambiguous temporality renders the Mizrahi neighborhood strangely timeless. Anachronistically interweaving visual references to both past and present, the film creates a sense of an enclosed Mizrahi space, somewhere in the south Tel Aviv area, as though even in the digital age time stands still for the Mizrahim of the “hood,” rather like a town that time forgot. While the neighborhood evokes a bygone era spanning the 1950s to the 1970s, hegemonic Israel, which looms in the background via a shot of the Ayalon highway and the Azrieli towers, is seen to have architecturally entered the world of global capitalism, even while as it has continued to underdevelop Mizrahi Israel. But rather than produce a sense of miserablist claustrophobia, Desperado Square, not unlike Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (1994), evokes the down-toearth sensuous pleasures of hood life. Reflexively, Desperado Square dialogues not only with Bourekas cinemas but also with Indian, Turkish, Iranian, Arab, Italian, and American cinema. The invention of Mizrahi culture in Israel takes places against the backdrop of an internalized self-rejection,where Greek music and Turkish cinema, however, marginalized, were for a long time seen as somewhat more legitimate than Arabic music and cinema (a topic addressed in Chapter 3). The film dialogues explicitly with the popular Indian film Sangam (1964), stringing together seemingly different worlds. The cinematic paradise gratifies the at once ludic and melancholy imaginary, which revolves around the hood, but also strives toward

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an “elsewhere.” In Desperado Square, this multilayered intertext is shaped through reflexive evocations, allusions, and quotations of Raj Kapoor’s Bollywood film Sangam, through dialogues, monologues, music, and film-within-the-film. The parallel and intersecting narratives between Desperado Square and Sangam, which revolve around a triangle love and sacrifice between two men and a woman, however, end differently. Sangam concludes with the tragic suicide of the protagonist, while Desperado Square culminates with the Bourekas-like melodramatic unification of the couple. In this film about cinematic nostalgia and escapist spectatorship, the mise-en-abyme has the film’s protagonist watch an Indian film, itself also watched by the spectators of Desperado Square. The film embraces an imaginary Mizrahiness that, despite its confined hood zone, is also interwoven into a wider “Oriental” geography that includes the “local” Arab. Casting the Palestinian Bakri to play the role of the Mizrahi, as suggested earlier, inverts the casting practices of the heroic nationalist films wherein the Mizrahi played the Arab enemy, but more importantly, it reclaims an explicit Arab identity, denigrated and denied to the Arab-Jew. The quotations from Sangam, especially in the decades following the arrival to Israel, express nostalgia for a cultural geography, for genre aesthetics, and for the gregarious collectivity of movie-going. Denied and rejected, a sense of “Easternness,” as suggested earlier, was shaped by the consumption of films, music, radio, and later TV programs from a variety of countries, including Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. Spectatorship on the margins of both Israel and the Arab world in a sense actively shaped an emerging new syncretic identity—the Mizrahim. The movie-theater and television, as spaces of social formation, generated a new collective memory specific to the Mizrahi experience in Israel. In a kind of recuperative discourse, Mizrahi intellectuals/ artists/ activists have come to express a mea culpa about years of self-rejection, denial, and internalization of the condemnations of their popular culture. In an aesthetic jujitsu, recent Mizrahi films have revisited the very signs of Levantine primitiveness—magic, folklore, and superstition. Shmuel Hasfari and Hana Azoulay-Hasfari’s Sh’hur (the title is the Arabic word for magic in its Moroccan pronunciation) on one level reinforces Mizrahi stereotypes but, at the same time it appropriates magic and insanity, mobilizing them against the emblems of Establishment modernity—Television.7 Desperado Square, similarly, resignifies superstition, specifically the urgency to respond to dreams of visits from the dead. One of the sons dreams that his dead father asks him to reopen their defunct theater; and the film ends

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with the carrying out of that dream-wish. The Hebrew title corresponds to the centrality of dream—“the square of dreams.” The melodramatic genre, in other words, is endorsed shamelessly, as though taunting the critics who condemned the “vulgar” Bourekas genre in the name of “quality cinema.” Ran Tal’s George Ovadia: Merchant of Feelings (1992) explicitly revisits the genre, rendering homage to a leading Bourekas melodrama director—the Iraqi-Iranian-Israeli George Ovadia.8 The reclaiming of the melodrama in Benny Torati’s Desperado Square or in Messika’s Desperate Steps can thus be seen as a way to assert Mizrahi popular taste whereby narrative and music serve to establish a confident voice from “the other Israel.” Despite the reunion of the couple at the end of the film, Desperado Square eschews the Bourekas cinema intra-Jewish mixed-marriage trope. Rather than a desire for integration, films like Desperado Square manifest a withdrawal into a world devoid of Ashkenazi characters, as though the fictive romance with “the East” would be disrupted by an overpowering iconic Euro-Israeli presence. Mixed marriage ending in divorce comes to allegorize the fraught Ashkenazi-Mizrahi relationship. At the height of the Bourekas genre’s popularity, when mixed-marriage allegorically resolved the narrative’s ethnic conflict, Sami Michael’s first novel All Men are Equal—But Some Are More crafted mixed-marriage as a site of pathological formation, reminiscent, I would suggest, of themes from Frantz Fanon’s “The Black Man and the White Woman” in Black Skin, White Masks. Over the years, the Ashkenazi/Mizrahi mixed-marriage trope has returned, but not necessarily within the same sensibility or ideology. Set during the first Gulf War, the David Ofek’s film Home (1994), for example, offers a bemused look at an Iraqi-Israeli family in a middle-class Iraqi town, Ramat Gan, trying to spot its old Baghdadi house from the TV images of Baghdad under attack. Iraq is abstracted, a dim reminiscence from the older generation’s fading memory; the family house remains in an Iraq that is clearly not home. The film ends with a pan to the filmmaker’s future family—his Euro-Israeli wife and children. The Iraqiness is subsumed into a transcendent ethnicity discourse, and in the vein of standup Mizrahi comedy, pokes fun at its own identity, at times in a self-Orientalizing fashion. The film’s ending asserts a postmodern Israel, beyond the old Ashkenazi/Mizrahi tensions, where “Iraqiness” becomes just one element in an ultimately coherent and integrated Israeli identity. Within such representational practices, we find a tendency to highlight fluid multicultural identities, where the pre-Israeli past is indeed fixed back in the past, a quaint background for a new Israeli culture.

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Despite shared leitmotifs, the Mizrahi cultural movement is thus not at all monolithic, given the undergirding political rifts around the historical Middle-Eastern Jewish relation to Zionism and the place of Mizrahim vis-àvis the state. The distinct narratives and genres also relay different sensibilities, investments, and negotiations vis-à-vis the hegemonic Euro-Israeli culture, on the one hand, and the marginalized Arab culture, on the other. While some films assume a nationalist framing of Mizrahi dislocation or belonging, others (e.g. Simone Bitton’s Yoredet, Eli Hamo’s New Direction, Benny Zada’s Hamara: A Place Near Life [1999], David Benchetrit’s Kaddim Wind, and Eli Hamo and Sami Chetrit’s The Black Panthers [in Israel] Speak) cast doubt on the Zionist master narrative.

Revisionist cultural practice If diasporic Palestinian cultural practices explore the shock of departure from Palestine, Israeli Mizrahi practices address the shock of entry to Israel. Many Mizrahi films, whether explicitly or implicitly, have as their reference point the traumatic period of arrival in Israel. The past two decades have brought a significant increase in documentaries that challenge Orientalist representations and inscribe an alternative Mizrahi perspective. Critical Mizrahi cinema (even, at times, when not made by Mizrahim) is embedded in a long sociopolitical struggle. The past two decades have seen a surge in revisionist accounts of history, explicitly tackling discriminatory state and Establishment policies and practices during the period of the “Ma‘abarot” (transit camps), including the controversial subjects of the Kidnapped Yemeni and Mizrahi Babies and the Ringworm Children. Archival footage and historical research are central to what can be called a revisionist Mizrahi cinema. Here “Mizrahi” stands less for the origins of the makers than for a sociopolitically critical perspective. Ayelet Heller’s Unpromised Land (1992), for example, follows the story of Yemeni Jews, who during the Ottoman period settled in the Sea of Galilee area and cultivated the land, largely as part of a messianic vision of the “promised land.” Yet in 1914, the land became “unpromised,” when a group of Ashkenazi pioneers, the well-known founders of Kvutzat Kinneret, took their land away, leading to the Yeminis’ dislocation. One of the elder Yemenis weeps as he recalls the disrespect and the humiliation, countering the kibbutz’ claim of an exclusively Ashkenazi “development,” denying Yemini labor. The camera follows the Yemeni

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descendants mourning their loss and confronting the Kibbutzniks who have erased their presence from the official history, now conveyed by tour guides, which glorifies the (European) founding fathers. While rewriting this history, the film frames the ethnic division of labor within the Jewish settlement without relating it to the question of Palestine. The socialist Zionist ideal of “Hebrew Work” was partly realized in the form of the exploitation and discrimination of Yemeni workers, called “Jews in the form of Arabs,” a concept crucial to the colonization of Palestine. Films such as Tali Shemesh’s White Gold/Black Labor (2004), meanwhile, examine continued labor discrimination in the contemporary era, in this case, in a development town in the South, revealing the persistence of an ethnic division of labor within Jewish Israel. Some documentaries perform historical research, uncovering erased moments in the repressed history of Arab-Jews’ arrival to Israel. Some films deal with the still buried story of the kidnapping of Yemeni and Mizrahi babies from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Disoriented by the new reality in Israel, Yemenis, as well as Jews from other Arab and Muslim countries, fell prey to the state’s welfare institutions, which provided babies for adoption largely in Israel and in the United States while telling the biological parents that their babies had died. Over several decades the government has ignored or silenced Mizrahi demands for investigation. Kidnappings were at least in part a result of a belief in the mission of Western Science and Progress, operating on a continuum with the reigning academic discourses of the time. In this intersection of race, gender, and class, the displaced Jews from Muslim countries became victims of the logic of Progress, bearing the marks of its pathologies on their bodies. In 1986, “Mabat Sheni,” a TV program on the subject denied and downplayed the historical veracity of the accusations, producing Orientalist narratives about neglectful children-breeding parents. Documentaries such as Tzipi Talmor’s Down a One Way Road (1997) and Uri Rozenwax’s Fact (Chanel 2, 1996)9 raise questions about this still unresolved episode. The topic is also dramatized in Yamin Messika’s fictional film, The Vineyard of Hope, about an American woman who comes to a south Tel Aviv neighborhood in search of her biological parents only to find out that she was never willingly given for adoption, that she is one of the kidnapped Yemeni babies.10 The investigative testimonial documentary Ringworm Children, by David Belhassen and Asher Hemias, opens up another suppressed chapter—the case of the X-ray radiation, said to be a treatment for ringworm, administered to approximately 100,000 children, primarily from North Africa, in the early

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1950s. The radiation resulted in high rates of mortality for children and fatal or chronic diseases for the survivors, including excruciating headaches, infertility, epilepsy, amnesia, Alzheimer’s, psychosis, cancer, and sexual dysfunction, along with aesthetic and psychological scars. According to the officials, the medical establishment was concerned with severe danger to public health posed by ringworm, but was unaware of the grave consequences of the treatment itself. A minor skin or scalp problem, which used to be treated in their home countries with vinegar, was “treated” in Israel with X-ray radiation doses surpassing 35,000 times the maximum recommended, this in an era, as the film shows, when the dangers of radiation were already known to the medical community. At times, children without any manifestation of a ringworm problem also received the X-rays, causing the deaths of several family members. Thousands of the children died shortly thereafter, while thousands of others perished as a result of cancers and other disorders, and others are still dying up to the present. As with other charges against the state apparatus, the official response is to claim that the calamity was unintentional. The film argues, in contrast, that the X-rays formed part of an experiment to test the effects of large radiation doses on humans. The program was apparently funded by American sponsors who supplied outmoded X-ray machines and made large payments to an Israeli government that could not have otherwise afforded the treatment/experiment. Whereas such experiments were no longer legal within the United States, they were still possible in Israel. A key official facilitator of the experiment, director general of the Israeli Health Ministry, Dr Chaim Sheba, according to the film, had opposed the “bringing” of North Africans to Israel on the basis of their supposedly contagious diseases as a threat to public health. After their arrival, Dr Sheba’s rhetoric continued in the same vein; he spoke of the war against ringworm as an “epidemic extermination.” The film includes archival footage, interviews with government officials, survivors’ testimonials, and written texts, all orchestrated to demonstrate the logic of racism. Ringworm Children’s examination of the Israeli–US scientific institutional links evokes other documentaries on eugenics, such as La Operacion (1982), which details the experimentation with birth control pills and forced sterilization on women in Puerto Rico. In the case of the ringworm children, it was the vulnerable “Third World” of Israel that was made available for medical experiments. The argument made throughout is that the children were deliberately poisoned, within an institutional racism that disregarded non-European lives, all carried out by the “Division for Social Medicine,” a euphemism for eugenics.

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Revisionist documentaries contribute, then, to the Mizrahi testimonial narrative. As with the documentaries about the kidnappings, some of the interviews with the ringworm survivors take place at the trauma site, for example in Sha‘ar Aliya (The Gate of Aliya) near the Haifa port. The film recalls the event from the point of view of the children, now adults, their bodies ravaged by time. The interviewees, addressing their testimonials to the camera, speak of their experiences, including having their head forcibly “scalped,” being “plucked like chicken,” and being “tied like sacrifice,” before being placed under a heavy machine without antiradiation protection and left alone for the duration of the radiation. They confess their resentment at their parents for permitting such an action, only to realize that, on the radiation day, the parents had been told that the students were being taken on a school trip. The non-diegetic music of Shlomo Bar and “The Natural Alternative”—a syncretic East/West musical ensemble associated both with protest and with recovering the Eastern dimension—underlines the larger historical and social pain. As with the kidnappings, the ringworm case has been suppressed for decades. The film tracks down the administrative processes that usually lead to the rejection of cases for “lack of proof,” but in the Ringworm case, in 1995, after a long struggle led by a few Mizrahi Knesset members, the Knesset passed a law mandating government compensation for the victims. (The “Ringworm Law,” however, did not include any admission of governmental wrongdoing.) The film intercuts scenes of official defenders of the government with the interviewees, in shots showing them both as individuals and as a collective. As the children of the 1950s continue to suffer and die, the film’s investigation reveals the extent to which information about such cases has been buried. This documentary, it is implied, has only begun to scratch the surface, highlighting the urgent need for more revisionist Mizrahi histories. In many ways, such films denaturalize and disrupt the discourse of Aliya and the teleological narrative of the Jewish nation-state. While it has been common in official political discourse as well as in artistic and scholarly practice to separate the Mizrahi question from the Palestinian question, and even sometimes to posit them as simply in conflict (e.g. by stressing the eternal persecution of Jews in the Arab world, or the putative ingrained tendency of Mizrahi to hate Arabs), such hegemonic narratives have been increasingly challenged. Directed by the Jewish-Moroccan filmmaker, David Benchetrit, the documentary Through the Veil of Exile follows three Palestinian women as they narrate their experiences under Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. But, in this instance, the exile of Palestinians and their dispossession comes to illuminate the subject

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position of the filmmaker himself, whose exile as a Moroccan Jew in Israel is allegorically displaced through the Palestinian narrative. In Kaddim Wind, as we have seen, Benchitrit narrates the nightmarish Moroccan experience in Israel as beginning already in Morocco, with the lure of Zion/ism. The archival footage that shows vehicles transferring Moroccan Jews to waiting boats revisits moments of traumatic separation. The sense of uprootedness is thus visually performed at the very overture of this epic documentary. The acoustic presence of the Moroccan national anthem on the soundtrack, meanwhile, stages the very question of living in between nation-states and the sense of a return to a taboo belonging in Morocco. Mizrahi cultural practices revisit the traumatic moment of entry into Israel that redefined a new collective identity born on the ruins of a hasty departure from one geography and a disturbed entrance into another. It is perhaps not a coincidence that, time and again, Mizrahim have returned to this primal scene—the moment of landing in the Holy Land, only to be sprayed by government agents with the disinfectant DDT. Already in 1974, Sami Michael’s novel All Men are Equal—But Some Are More registered that paradigmatic moment of arrival when the protagonist’s father, full of dreamy hope, is met with DDT. Literary fiction legitimated an experience that formerly had only been part of oral narratives, discussed in Mizrahi homes and neighborhoods. Three decades later, a new literature and cinema has emerged centering on the shocking moment of arrival, but this time actively shaping the visual and oral archive. Revisionist Mizrahi Cinema has invariably depicted the impact of this history on the lives of Mizrahim. While some of the films form part of a broader intellectual project critiquing Euro-Israeli historiography, others take this history and the struggle on the “periphery” as a backdrop for captivating dramas or autobiographies of the protagonists of Mizrahi struggle, as in such films as Amit Goren’s 6 Open, 21 Closed, David Ofek’s No. 17 (2003), Nissim Mossek’s Have You Heard About the Black Panthers? (2002) and Who is Mordechai Vanunu? (2004), and David Fisher’s Buried But Alive (1996). Nissim Mossek’s Who is Mordechai Vanunu?, for example, tells the story of the Moroccan-Israeli nuclear whistle-blower who was recently released after 18 years in solitary confinement, in a context where Vanunu had been vilified as the enemy of the people. Told against the backdrop of the Black Panther rebellion of the 1970s, Buried But Alive, for its part, narrates the story of Mazal Sa‘il, wife of Dani Sa‘il, an “‘aguna” who fights the rabbinical establishment in a convoluted case involving a Black Panther who vanished, or was perhaps made to “disappear.” Although Dani Sa‘il

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declared his intention to return to the “enemy country” of Iraq in the late 1970s, his whereabouts and trajectory have yet to be revealed. Caught in the gears of the rabbinical state apparati, Mazal Sa‘il has lived in legal limbo for about 20 years.11 Also, in Nissim Mossek’s Have You Heard About the Black Panthers? “the Black Panthers’ past looms against the present, with Mossek incorporating his own 1973 footage of Jerusalem’s Musrara neighborhood and of the young rebels from his earlier documentary Have You Heard About the Panthers, Mr. Moshe?” The quoted film becomes a steppingstone for a contemporary journey for the older Black Panthers—notably Charlie Bitton, Sa‘adia Martziano, and Kokhavi Shemesh—who remained on the political scene even after the dissolution of the movement. In a kind of Black Panther road movie, the film travels across the country in search of other former members. Many members still live in poverty; some continue in the same activist path, while others have found solace in religious mysticism, as in the case of ‘Amram Cohen, who relocated to the ancient city of Safad. The spectator comes to reflect on the passage of time—their language, discourses, and faces that no longer correspond to the iconic images of the young Panthers. Providing the narrative’s organizational principle, the journey thus metaphorizes the long road traveled since the heydays of Sephardi rebellion. Eli Hamo and Sami Chetrit’s The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak, meanwhile, pays homage to the egalitarian vision of the Black Panthers, elucidating the radicalization of the Mizrahi struggle. The film offers a sociopolitical analysis through interviews with leaders of the movement—Charlie Bitton, Sa‘adia Martziano, Kochavi Shemesh, Reuven Abergil, and also including Haim Hanegbi of the leftist Matzpen group.12 Seeing themselves as the children of earlier protests, and especially of the 1959 Wadi Salib rebellion, they address some of the movement’s better-known symbolic actions, such as removing milk bottles from the rich Ashkenazi neighborhood and distributing them to the residents of the Mizrahi working-class neighborhood in Jerusalem. For the Ashkenazim, they left a provocative flyer: “We’re taking your milk today in order to give it to people in need. We assume this milk was for your cats and dogs.” And to the Mizrahim, the milk arrived with the message: “We managed to get milk for you today, but don’t get used to it. If you’ll join us, we’ll do a lot more together.” The film also examines the movement’s relation to the Palestinian struggle, reminding viewers that the Black Panthers met with the PLO leaders already in 1972 and recognized them as the leaders of the Palestinian people, in a period when Golda Meir used to say that there was no such thing as the Palestinian people. In line with subsequent

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Mizrahi leftist movements, which have emphasized the interdependency of Palestinian and Mizrahi issues, the film offers a retrospective prism that simultaneously engages the present. Lamenting the Shas Party’s destructive impact on the radical Mizrahi struggle,13 the film addresses the negative role of diverse Sephardi/Mizrahi establishment-dominated organizations, while offering an ideological analysis of the emergence of anti-racist struggle in Israel. Past decades have witnessed a multidimensional revisionist project of public pedagogy by organizations such as Hila, Kedma, Andalus, and the Alternative Information Center. Documentaries such as Simone Bitton’s Yoredet and Yochi Dadon-Spigel’s Gifted focus especially on the role of the centralized educational system, and specifically on the boarding school education track whose purpose was to inject young generation Mizrahim with Euro-Israeli “values.” The assimilationist institution of the boarding school separated Mizrahi children from their parents, community, and home culture. Staging a reunion among a few 1978 graduates, Gifted presents conflicting perspectives on the experience. While some see boarding school as a steppingstone for success, others, such as activist Tikva Levi, regard it as a “meat grinder,” which produces a shocking encounter between impoverished Mizrahim and the children of Jerusalem’s elite. The activism of alternative educational organizations such as Hila and Kedma, for Levi, provided an antidote against a racist educational system that provoked shame, self-hatred, and identity crises in Mizrahi pupils. Artists too have participated in this process of curricular critique. Meir Gal’s artwork “9 out of 400” challenged the state-determined school curriculum through a photo showing the artist holding the 9 pages devoted to the Jews of Islam from a 400-page book on Jewish History. The textual proportions, hanging literally in the face of the viewer, provide dramatic visual evidence of pedagogical marginalization. The period since the mid-1990s has witnessed a notable increase in cultural activism. New films and media venues include local cable TV and a channel, Briza, devoted to Mizrahi social concerns and cultural issues.14 The creation of diverse public spaces for the screening of critical films has in itself further facilitated collective narration and reassessment of Mizrahi struggle and history. Co-curated by Moshe Behar, Tikva Levi, and Osnat Trabelsi, the film series “From a Dark Angle” (2003–4) in the privileged space of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque featured some of the revisionist films discussed earlier, and thus redefined the cinemateque space both in terms of themes and of audience. The screening of Ringworm Children, for instance, gathered the survivors of that unfortunate episode, allowing for a cathartic experience and an activist debate

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that transformed a Cinematheque site seldom frequented by working class Mizrahim.15 Another key festival, combining films, exhibition, and conference, entitled “Mother Tongue” (2002), highlighted the intricate question of language for Mizrahim, exploring the linguistic discontinuities generated by colonial education in the countries of origin and by the dislocation to Israel. The film festival program, organized by Sigal Morad Eshed, featured films that looked at familial biographies characterized by cultural fragmentation and linguistic discontinuity, between Hebrew and Arabic as well as with other languages, such as French, Farsi, and Ladino. The exhibit, curated by Tal Be Zvi, included visual work by Pinchas Cohen Gan, Meir Gal, Yaacob Ronen Morad, Miriam Cabessa, Dafna Shalom, Adi Nes, Yigal Nizri, Khen Shish, Eli Fatal, Tal Matzliah, and David Adika. The emerging field of critical Arab-Jewish/Sephardi/Mizrahi writing, meanwhile, challenged the canon of Jewish, Hebrew, and Israel studies. Eschewing Eurocentric frames of reference, intellectuals have anatomized the complexities of the Mizrahi identity and cultural production. To mention just a few key texts, Sami Chetrit’s 100 Years of Mizrahi Writing, a three-volume anthology, redraws the contours of the canon of modern Hebrew literature by calling attention to a wealth of texts written over the past century, Ammiel Alcalay’s edited volume Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, an assemblage of poems, short stories, novel excerpts, and interviews, also relays a multifaceted spectrum of Israeli writing, while his After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture delves into such writings against the backdrop of the wider geographical and historical frame of the Mediterranean. Yerach Gover’s Zionism: The Limits of Moral Discourse in Israeli Hebrew Fiction, for its part, foregrounds insurgent Hebrew literature by Mizrahi writers; Gil Hochberg’s In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination explores the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Smadar Lavie’s work centers on Mizrahi and Palestinian writers working between Hebrew and Arabic as Third World authors. Zvi Ben-Dor addresses the charged Israeli context for the speaking and teaching of Arabic for Arab-Jews. Ruth Tsoffar analyzes the Mizrahi body through tropes of hunger, eating, and feeding in Mizrahi poetry. Yigal Nizri’s introduction and edited volume Eastern Appearance: A Present that Stirs the Thickets of its Arab Past probes issues of identity in terms of looks, body, and language. Several scholars have examined the representation of the Mizrahi identity on screen, specifically, Yaron Shemer, whose dissertation explores identity and place in contemporary Mizrahi cinema, and Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, whose dissertation examines

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the media rhetoric on the episode of the Kidnapped Yemeni children.16 No longer invisible, critical scholarship on Arab-Jews/Mizrahim, in general, has come to form a transdisciplinary field that might be termed “Mizrahi studies.” These variegated texts and cultural practices allow elisions and ambivalences to emerge in full force. Against this backdrop, revisionist Mizrahi cinema has interrogated the doxa of official History, posing questions about the “what ifs” and the haunting silences of history. The potency of such work ultimately lies in the poetics of dissonance that facilitate a reading of Arab-Jewish/Mizrahi narratives beyond the boundaries of Israel, accentuating multidirectional regional connectivities. Whether in cinema, literature, or the visual arts, Arab-Jews narrate their memory of their Arab past, reinscribing the hyphen, as it were, between Jews and Arabs, and at times, between the Jew and the Muslim. Political geographies and state borders, in sum, do not always coincide with imaginary geographies, whence the existence of “internal émigrés,” nostalgics, and rebels— that is, groups of people who share the same passport but whose relationship to the nation-state is conflictual and ambivalent. Within a situation where the state created the nation, the educational and social apparatus was mobilized to enforce an adherence to narrowly defined notions of Jewishness and Arabness. Yet despite the efforts to transform Middle Eastern/Arab-Jews into Israeli Jews, Mizrahi Israeliness remains complex, ambivalent, and contingent, and now expressed in a new sense of cultural politics.

Notes 1 On the production of Tkuma, see Eric Saranovitz’s Negotiating History in an Era of Globalization: The Production of Narratives of a Nation’s Past in the Israeli Media, PhD Dissertation, New York University, 2006. 2 In the realm of film and music, Salima Mourad Pasha, an Iraqi-Jewish singer, and Leila Mourad, an Egyptian musical film star, both converted to Islam and stayed in Iraq and Egypt respectively. 3 For an account of travel in the region, from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, see Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land (New York: Knopf, 1992). 4 One exhibition was dedicated to diaries written by Mizrahi women, curated by Shula Keshet at the Ami Steinitz’s Gallery—Contemporary Art, 2000. 5 Both Ron Kahlili and Shosh Gabay conceived the series, narrated by Tikva Levi. 6 For an account of the Mizrahi struggle, see Sami Chetrit, “Mizrahi Politics in Israel: Between Integration and Alternative,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 4

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8

9 10 11

12

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14 15 16

Deeper than Oblivion (Autumn, 2000): 51–65; and The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel: 1948–2003 [in Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2004). The film, directed by Shmuel Hasfari and written by Azoulay-Hasfari, provoked a passionate debate among Mizrahim: some saw it as continued stereotyping while others saw it as an assertion of Moroccan culture. The recuperation of the melodrama in the cinema also appears at a moment when telenovelas, especially from Latin America, are consumed in Israel via Israeli or Jordanian broadcast. For an account of Latin American telanovelas in Israel, see Tomás López-Pumarejo, “Telenovelas and the Israeli Television Market,” Television & New Media 8, no. 3 (2007): 197–212. The research for the documentaries was prepared by Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber. The screenplay was written by Yirmi Kadosh, Messika’s longtime collaborator, and by Mizrahi activist Ilana Sugbeker. After the completion of the film, some testimony suggested that Sa’il was buried in Baghdad in the early 1980s, although no witness claimed to have seen his body, and thus the full story of a person considered a traitor by the Shabak remains unknown. The filmmaker also traveled with Mazal Sa’il to Amsterdam to meet a newly arrived Baghdadi Jew who was able to testify and thus release her from the status of ’aguna. www.itu.org.il/Index.asp?ArticleID=4924& CategoryID=762& Page=1. While Haim Hanegbi at the time was not active in the Black Panthers, he did participate in the 1989 Toledo meeting between Palestinians and Mizrahi intellectuals. In his speech, he brought up his Sephardi Hebronite background, at a time when some critical intellectuals were claiming their identity as Palestinian Jews to deligitimize the settlers’ claim on the old city of Hebron (or al-Khalil in Arabic), supposedly in the name of the indigenous Hebronite Jewish inhabitants. Eli Hamo has documented Mizrahi activism going back to the 1980s with Bimat Kivun Hadash in south Tel Aviv. Some of this filmic record can be found on the Kedma website established by Sami Chetrit, and dedicated to leftist Mizrahi perspectives. In conjunction with The Black Panthers (in Israel) Speak, Sami Chetrit and Eli Bareket organized an event dedicated to “30 Years to the Black Panthers,” in cooperation with Shatil and TZAH—Students for Social Justice at the Hebrew University. Briza, part of the satellite station YES, was founded by Ron Kahlili in the late 1990s. Osnat Trabelsi also produced some of the revisionist films about both Mizrahi and Palestinian issues. Sami Chetrit, ed., One Hundred Years of Mizrahi Writing: An Anthology [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Kedem Publishing, 1988); Ammiel Alcalay, Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1996) and After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

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1993); Yerach Gover, Zionism: The Limits of Moral Discourse in Israeli Hebrew Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Gil Hochberg, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Smadar Lavie, “Blowups in the Borderzones: Third World Israeli Authors’ Gropings for Home,” New Formations 18 (1992): 84–106; Zvi Ben Dor, “Eyb, Heshumah, Infajrat Qunbula: Towards a History of Mizrahim and Arabic,” in Eastern Appearance : A Present that Stirs in the Thickets of Its Arab Past [in Hebrew], ed. Yigal Nizri (Tel Aviv: Babel, 2004) and in Oznik, www.oznik.com/toward-a-history-of-mizrahim-and-arabic.html; Ruth Tsoffar, “‘A Land that Devours Its People’: Mizrahi Writing from the Gut,” Body & Society 12, no. 2, (2006): 25–55; Yigal Nizri, ed., Eastern Appearance; Yaron Shemer, “Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema,” PhD Dissertation, University of Texas, Austin, 2005; Shoshana Madmoni-Gerber, “Media Construction of Public Sphere and the Discourse of Conflict: A Case Study of the Kidnapped Yemenite Babies Affair in Israel,” PhD Dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 2003, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.

Bibliography Alcalay, Ammiel. After Jews And Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. —. Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing. San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1996. Ben Dor, Zvi. “Eyb, Heshumah, Infajrat Qunbula: Towards a History of Mizrahim and Arabic.” In Eastern Appearance: A Present that Stirs in the Thickets of Its Arab Past [in Hebrew], ed. Yigal Nizri, 29–44. Tel Aviv: Babel, 2004. Chetrit, Sami. “Mizrahi Politics in Israel: Between Integration and Alternative,” Journal of Palestine Studies 29, no. 4 (2000): 51–65. —. The Mizrahi Struggle in Israel: 1948–2003 [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 2004. Chetrit, Sami, ed. One Hundred Years of Mizrahi Writing: An Anthology [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Kedem Publishing, 1988. Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. New York: Knopf, 1992. Gover, Yerach. Zionism: The Limits of Moral Discourse in Israeli Hebrew Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Hochberg, Gil. In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Lavie, Smadar. “Blowups in the Borderzones: Third World Israeli Authors’ Gropings for Home.” New Formations 18 (1992): 84–106.

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López-Pumarejo, Tomás. “Telenovelas and the Israeli Television Market,” Television & New Media 8, no. 3 (2007): 197–212. Nizri, Yigal, ed., Eastern Appearance: A Present that Stirs in the Thickets of Its Arab Past [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Babel, 2004. Tsoffar, Ruth. “‘A Land that Devours Its People’: Mizrahi Writing from the Gut.” Body & Society 12, no. 2 (2006): 25–55.

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Gender, the Military, Memory, and the Photograph: Tamar Yarom’s To See If I’m Smiling and American Films about Abu Ghraib Diane Waldman

On Monday, August 16, 2010, Israeli bloggers copied and circulated several images posted on Facebook by a former Israeli soldier, Eden Abergil. The photographs, part of a series labeled “IDF—the best time of my life,” depicted Abergil posing in front of or next to bound and blindfolded Palestinian detainees. Military spokespeople condemned the photos as aberrant, the “shameless and ugly behavior of one soldier,” while left-wing bloggers and human rights groups, Israeli and Palestinian, described them, rather, as typical, “a norm in the way Palestinians are viewed” (Isai Menuchin, Israel’s Public Committee Against Torture), “the result of military rule over a civilian population over a long time” (Breaking the Silence), and “an example of the day to day life of the Palestinian people under occupation . . . a cause of suffering, and humiliating, for the Palestinian people every day and . . . an indicator [of] the fact that occupation also corrupts the Israelis” (Ghassan Khatib, the Palestinian Authority).1 This series of events testifies to the deep divisions in Israeli society over the occupation and serves as a reminder (as if we needed one) of the different uses to which the same photographs may be put.2 Suggesting that Abergil might feel differently about her service in retrospect, Israeli blogger Dimi Reider pointed by way of comparison to Tamar Yarom’s 2007 documentary To See If I’m Smiling, a film based on interviews with six female veterans of service in the occupied territories, thus catapulting the film back into public view (for Israelis and attendees of various human rights, Jewish,

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or women’s film festivals internationally)3 or into public view for the first time for readers of Robert Mackey’s New York Times blog (which provided a link to it).4 The photographs of a grinning female soldier next to bound and blindfolded prisoners also evoked comparisons to the more notorious photos of US soldiers Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman posing with Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Part of the fascination of all these photos is the way they confound traditional gender expectations about perpetrators and victims and reveal anxieties about the increased presence or changing roles of women in these nations’ militaries for those on all sides of the political spectrum.5 In her essay “The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer: Documentary Form and the Logic of Enjoyment,”6 Hilary Neroni argues that films such as Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure (2008), Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (2007), and Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) successfully challenge the Bush Administration’s ideology of torture but fail to address the most disturbing aspects of the Abu Ghraib photos—the smiles on the faces of the perpetrators. To See If I’m Smiling, on the other hand, takes its title from an incident which explores this very thing—the smile on the face of a soldier who posed for a photo next to a corpse. This essay will explore, despite some surface similarities, the different status of the photograph both within the interviewees’ narration and within the discourse of the films as a whole in To See If I’m Smiling, Standard Operating Procedure, and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, as part of an argument about the different function of these films in their specific national contexts. Raya Morag has discussed To See If I’m Smiling as part of a wave of recent Israeli films7 which, rather than focusing on the trauma of the victimized Palestinian, focus on the trauma of the perpetrator.8 In the case of To See If I’m Smiling the six women interviewed testify both to abuses and atrocities to which they were witnesses or participants and to the effects of such witnessing or participation on them: confusion, guilt, shame, anger, insomnia, and alcoholism. On the other hand, I would argue that films such as Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Standard Operating Procedure have a different focus and purpose: both (although in rather different ways) seek to explain how torture and human rights abuses occurred at the prison and why it was that some of those who carried out or documented these practices were punished and those who authorized or ordered them were not. Most disturbing to viewers of these films, however, is the fact that what human rights discourse would refer to as the “direct perpetrators” do not, in fact, seem traumatized by events in which they participated and this has opened up a debate about the extent to which these films, particularly Morris’s, evade

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the responsibility of the perpetrators and contribute to the degradation of their victims.9 In order to illustrate this contrast in focus and purpose, I will describe in detail three sequences: the first is from Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, the second from Standard Operating Procedure, and the third from To See If I’m Smiling. The first two present Sabrina Harman, one of the so-called bad apples court-martialed and sentenced in the aftermath of the scandal wrought by the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, attempting to explain the circumstances of the photograph in which she appears with the corpse of the man later identified as Mandel al-Jamadi, a man who was tortured and murdered during interrogation. The third presents Meytal Sandler, a medic and medical officer serving in Hebron, describing an incident that occurred when she was engaged in the process of cleaning a corpse for return to the Palestinian Authority. The sequence from Ghosts of Abu Ghraib opens on a body bag and tilts down as we hear a female voice narrate: “We came to the prison and we were told that a prisoner just died and that he died of a heart attack.” The voice is then revealed as Harman’s as Kennedy cuts to her holding a poster of a blown-up photograph, only the top of which is initially visible. Harman continues with her narration as the camera tilts down to reveal more of the photograph showing Harman positioned over the bandaged corpse smiling and giving the “thumbs up” sign: “Of course Sergeant Fredrickson and me were like . . . it’s just a dead body . . . he died of a heart attack . . . and I believe Corporal Graner took a photo of me . . . it was just a dead guy . . . it was supposed to be just a dead guy . . . and we didn’t realize until after these photos were taken that he was bleeding in places that you wouldn’t bleed from just a heart attack.” At this point Kennedy cuts to a full frame shot of the photo alone, as Harman explains: “Well, the thumbs up, I got that from the little kids . . . the smile . . . I always smile for the cameras; it’s just the natural thing you do when you’re in front of the camera . . . it really (Kennedy cuts back to Harman) wasn’t anything negative toward this guy . . . I didn’t know he was just murdered . . . I thought it’s war . . . another dead guy . . . no big deal.” In the sequence from Standard Operating Procedure, a slightly older-looking Harman is shown in medium close up, describing the same incident: “It was kind of obvious . . . if you kept looking . . . that there was no way he died of a heart attack.” At this point Morris cuts to various photos of al-Jamadi’s head, upper body, and then the same photo of Harman positioned smiling over his body. We hear Morris’s voice, one of the very few places in the film that we hear it, saying “You’ve gotten into trouble because of the thumb.” We then hear Harman’s reply:

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“I can understand . . . it does look really bad but whenever I would get into a photo I never know what to do with my hands . . . (Morris cuts back to Harman) . . . Any kind of photo, I probably have a thumbs up . . . ’cause it’s just (she shrugs) . . . something that automatically happens . . . like when you get into a photo, you want to smile . . . it’s just (she shrugs) . . . I guess . . . something I did.” (She shrugs again and Morris holds on her for what seems like an uncomfortably long or awkward period of time.) The sequence from To See If I’m Smiling begins with an observational sequence of soldiers behind a fence, conversing on radio transmitters and receivers. A woman’s voice comes up over these images: “The weekend comes along and again I’m alone in the sector.” Yarom cuts to Meytal in her apartment. “Again we’re on high alert and there’s a shooting battle, and again, there’s another dead body.” (She smiles, and shrugs.) And what is by now normal procedure, we take the body, put it near the latrines, and wash it.10 Then . . . something very funny happens: he has an erection. (She shakes her head.) A dead body with an erection. We laugh a little because it’s embarrassing. And . . . it’s open grounds so anyone can come take a peek. Some female sergeants that I knew arrive from the operations room. One of them has a camera and . . . without even thinking I tell her: ‘Come take my picture.’ I sit down next to the dead body and . . . I have my picture taken.” There is silence as Meytal looks at the interviewer as if to cry. At this point Yarom cuts away from Meytal in the present to what is retrospectively revealed as home movie footage from the going-away party at the end of her military service. There are some superficial circumstantial similarities: in both cases these women are given the job of literally cleaning up or participating in the covering up of the violence perpetrated by others. And in both cases the women responded in part, by posing or asking to be photographed with the bodies of the dead, and now reflect on the meaning of that act. But the affect is totally different, both in terms of the women’s demeanor and the effect on the viewer of these sequences. And the status of the photograph is different, both in terms of these sequences and the discourse of the films as a whole. In both Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Standard Operating Procedure both Harman and the viewer are confronted with the photograph itself as evidence—but evidence of what exactly is not specified. The photo by itself does not constitute evidence of torture and murder during interrogation, as Harman is at pains to point out. In Harman’s words, she knows it “looks really bad,” but why? The unspoken is that the photo serves as evidence of ideology or what Judith Butler has described as one of the “frames of war”: the

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ignorance, arrogance, and racism that might cause one to gloat or triumph over the death of the enemy, the ethnic other.11 Harman partially acknowledges this when she says, “it really wasn’t anything negative toward this guy,” implying that others might think it was. Her explanations for why she is giving the thumbs up sign and smiling, as others who have written on these sequences have noted,12 however, falls short. It appears, as Jonathan Kahana has written about the testimonies in Standard Operating Procedure, to function not as a confession but as an excuse: a relative ethical claim that says, “I had good reason to do the thing which to you seems wrong,” appealing to the listener “to reconsider both historical and ethical givens and standards; to entertain another explanation of what happened and what it means now.”13 This does not necessarily mean that I think that the viewer is persuaded by such claims; on the contrary, I align myself with those14 who believe that both these films, each in its own way, positions the viewer to question if not outright reject such explanations—in Kennedy’s case, through her inclusion of other voices (including those of Iraqi detainees) that challenge and contest such assertions, in Morris’s, through the film’s ironic title, the selection and arrangement of interviews, photographs, and reenactments, the few places where his questions can be heard, and his lingering, as in this case, on the interviewees’ uncomfortable demeanor after such utterances. But the sequence in To See If I’m Smiling presents what Kahana, in the same piece, would call a confession: quoting Paul de Man that “to confess is to overcome guilt and shame in the name of truth,” it “attests to a change (of heart) in its speaker . . . in reference to social standards—which are shared by speaker and listener.”15 In other words, Meytal says, “I did this in the past; I’m deeply ashamed of it now.” Precisely what writers such as Julia Lesage and Hillary Neroni16 see lacking from the speakers in the other two films—shame and remorse—is all too painfully present in the subject’s hesitant speech and distressed facial expression. Rather than being confronted with the photograph as evidence of something in need of explanation to others, the speaker brings it up herself. Rather than presenting Meytal (and the viewer) with the photograph Yarom chooses to cut away from Meytal, narrating in the present, to home movie footage of Meytal in the past, specifically footage of the going-away party at the end of her military service. This footage stands in metonymically for the photograph in question, testifying to a Meytal with a different appearance and demeanor enjoying her time with friends from her unit. Yarom allows the sequence to run with its original synchronized soundtrack for several seconds, before returning to Meytal’s narration in the present over these images from the past: “I’m not

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sure when it was but at some point I became very ashamed of that picture . . . And I didn’t tell anyone about it, that it existed. I forgot about it a little. But I would like to see it. To see if I look different . . . I want to see if I’m smiling.” And although Yarom, will, in the film’s final sequence, show Meytal looking at what we presume from the context to be the photograph,17 it is never displayed to the viewer (Figure 3.1). How might we interpret this directorial (and perhaps interviewee) decision? Is this yet another example of what Morag, in the essay mentioned above, refers to as a “crisis of evidence,” an inability of these films that present the trauma of the perpetrator to “confront the epistemic dynamics of horror with evidence of the horror?”18 Or is another interpretation possible? Besides making Yarom less vulnerable to charges of exploiting the image of the person degraded by such photographs (as was the case with Morris and Standard Operating Procedure),19 this cinematic choice puts the emphasis on the meaning of the photograph to the speaking subject and not on its status as evidence of abuse to others.20 It is an example of what Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas describe in their introduction to The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture as the material image enabling particular agency in relation to historical trauma, “grounded in the performative (rather than the constative) function of the act of bearing witness,” not “merely depict[ing] the historical world” but “participat[ing] in its transformation.”21 Additionally, I would argue

Figure 3.1 Meytal Sandler from To See If I’m Smiling by Tamar Yarom. Courtesy of Ruth Diskin Films.

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that this juxtaposition of past and present, image and voice in the home movie footage furthers this sense of retrospective analysis and foregrounds the way that film and photographic images can serve—not just as evidence of abuses or atrocities—but as an impetus to reflection and an opportunity to present a changed consciousness.22 That the film itself served as an impetus both to memory and to a more critical perspective on recalled events is revealed by several of the testimonies by former women soldiers collected and published by the Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence.23 For example, one woman says, “I recall once I thought it was a trifle but I remembered it while watching the film ‘To See If I’m Smiling.’” She then relates a story of learning from men in her company in Hebron about the practice of the looting of prayer-beads “from the Arabs.” She then continues, “I didn’t know there was such a phenomenon. After seeing the film I suddenly realized, this is a phenomenon indeed. And then suddenly it hooked up, and it’s most weird when I link it to things that happened in the Holocaust, when skullcaps were taken off men’s heads. Come on, this is important, have some respect.”24 A “trifle” is thus re-coded as a widespread practice of religious disrespect and furthermore compared to the treatment of Jewish citizens during the Holocaust.25 More generally, when asked how she feels, coming out of “there” (it is not specified, but implied the Occupied Territories), another says, “A bit ashamed.” “From the beginning?” the interviewer asks. “When I got out of the army. Now, gradually, especially after seeing this film, I suddenly realized there were things I had experienced and didn’t think about . . . except for [she names certain specific incidents] those parts all the rest seemed normal, routine. Then after seeing that film, ‘To See If I’m Smiling,’ I suddenly began to take note of things and realized how screwed-up this whole system is. No one is okay. Those aren’t okay, and these aren’t okay, and the army is not okay.”26 In both these examples, the film encouraged these women not only to remember that which had been forgotten from service in the Occupied Territories but to see it in a different, more critical light, and perhaps to add their own voices to those who have previously come forward. What might account for some of the differences I’ve outlined between these sequences and between the films in which they occur? Why is Sabrina Harman—arguably the most sympathetic of the so-called bad apples27—still so defensive, her explanation for her behavior so inadequate when compared to the reflective and remorseful response of Meytal Sandler? My comparison might be misinterpreted as an argument for the moral superiority of the IDF over

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other armed forces; I certainly do not intend it as such.28 The first question we might ask is about representativeness: how representative are these interviews of responses of people (in particular women) serving in the US army in Iraq and the Israeli Defense Forces in the Occupied Territories? We know how the interviewees—female and male—were chosen for Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Standard Operating Procedure: they were the subjects of an official investigation and court-martial and express all the anger and bitterness at being the scapegoats for policies mandated from above.29 They are not there to atone or confess for participating in acts they have later reevaluated but to try to exonerate themselves in the court of public opinion. The six women whose stories are presented in To See If I’m Smiling were not subject to similar official procedures; we presume that they voluntarily came forward to relate their experiences to the filmmaker, also a female veteran of the IDF.30 Although the structure of the film and the identification of each woman only by her first name and military occupation might suggest that they are a representative sample of females serving in the IDF, there are hints that they might not be. For example, several Israeli veterans and human rights organizations—Breaking the Silence, B’Tselem—the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories—are given special thanks in Yarom’s credits—perhaps she found some of her subjects through these organizations.31 In an article in Haaretz published at the time of the film’s release in 2007, at least two of the women who appear in the film identify themselves as “leftist,” and/or not wanting to serve in the territories even before their service began.32 That they are not identified as such in the film might be attributed to Yarom’s desire to do more than preach to the choir; when asked about the political stance of the film (in this same article) she replied that it had none because it’s a mainstream film and she was afraid that a more overtly political stance would cause people to “switch channels.” However, she added: The film is political only in that the Israeli viewer comes to this subject and projects a lot of his own political meanings onto it. The only thing that has value is the attempt to relate the experience of service in the territories, and women are good at describing emotional situations. Through them you can understand the psychology of the guys who serve in the territories. It’s not different, it’s just more extreme . . . If you’re in the territories you’ll be sullied by this thing and come out a different person. I went into the territories with an excellent upbringing and came out a different person. I was afflicted by moral confusion there. That’s my position, and the position of the film.

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This stance, while broadening the audience for the film, severs the women’s experiences in their military service from their prior (or subsequent) experiences in civilian life and from debates occurring elsewhere in Israeli society. It places the emphasis on the experience of serving as a member of an occupying army as the radicalizing experience: hence the excision of any reference to pre-military service political positions and the emphasis on the experiences of those, such as Meytal Sandler, who present themselves as initially quite eager to serve in the territories33 and consequently are most traumatized by what they find there. Yarom’s statement also explains something that was confusing to me the first time I watched the film. As opposed to Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Standard Operating Procedure,34 Yarom’s opening titles announce a particular concern with both gender and service in the occupied territories35 and she interviews only women veterans. Naively, perhaps, I expected more concrete answers to the questions of what effect military service, especially in the territories, has on women in Israel and conversely, what effect women might have on the military. Upon first viewing it appears that some of the stories the women relate explicitly deal with gendered experiences of this service (having to survive either by adopting stereotypically masculine characteristics or falling back upon traditionally feminine ones, being subject to a threatening masculine gaze or gestures), but most do not. Upon repeated viewings, however, a more subtle analysis of the gendered nature of military experience emerges. For example, shortly after operations sergeant Inbar Michelzon is introduced, she relates an incident in which she was told by a male commander to order the rewriting of a report in which soldiers admit to beating up a Palestinian boy and burning him with cigarettes. She recalls thinking about contacting journalist Carmela Menashe36 (she could offer as evidence the two reports) but ultimately does not. She says “I was struggling to remain humane, at least a little . . . in the reality I was in, it was completely wiped out . . . Why didn’t I do it? Because it was a fantasy . . . I really don’t know why I didn’t do it.” This sequence is immediately followed by one that shows a male bonding ritual in a dining hall, and then education officer Dana Behar discussing how “the volume is very high” in the Territories: “Everyone yells with one another and . . . like ‘Hey, dude,’ everybody talks like this.” (She lowers her voice and acts it out.) “It’s funny that you, as a girl, take on masculine traits. You find yourself talking like a man, you hide your feminine characteristics. Because everyone knows you’re a woman, that won’t change, but to be ‘one of the guys,’37 to belong.” This sequence in turn precedes one in which Behar describes her ostracism by one of the units to which she was assigned

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when she reported their looting of prayer beads and Korans to a superior. She subsequently regrets doing it. While ostracism can and does happen to male as well as female whistle-blowers,38 the placement of these sequences—before and after those that emphasize the masculinist military culture of the IDF—suggests a particular type of pressure on women, as outsiders to that culture, to conform to prevailing norms in order to fit in or survive. At other points the film troubles or complicates any exclusive focus on gender by insisting on other factors (such as nationality, class, or ethnicity) that simultaneously shape these women soldiers’ experiences. Many of these moments focus on looking or the gaze, important to a film where the spectator is encouraged to see through the perspective (through moving vehicles, rifle sights, or surveillance equipment) of the occupying forces. For example, combat soldier Libi Abramov describes an incident where when alone, she was subject to an Arab man’s stares and obscene gestures. Later she returns with male soldiers from her unit, chases him down, tries to make him return her gaze, and then participates in his sexual abuse. This recalls what Raya Morag has eloquently written about the sequence described above with Meytal: “There is no doubt that as a traumatic experience, cleansing and erasing the traces of the castrated other, the living dead, who had earlier been a potential sexual threat, has meaning beyond exposure to the utmost abject. In terms of gender, and not just ethnic conflict, the castrated corpse having an erection objectifies and haunts the female soldier. Taking a picture is, therefore, the site of perpetration, a means of mastering the ghostly–manly power of the other, of finally arresting and degrading it.”39 In both these sequences, then, the real or presumed sexual threat of the Arab man to the Jewish Israeli woman is met with actual or symbolic violence, violence including the question of who has the power to look or to turn the other into a spectacle, a sight. At another point Tal Ben Sira-Morag, a welfare officer, describes an incident that occurred in the aftermath of a bombing of a Palestinian village. It was her twentieth birthday, and it was “the first time I encountered a population in a real distressed state of fighting, of war.” She sees a crying baby and says it “felt instinctive” to want to go and pick him up, to hug him, to calm him down, but the child’s mother gave her such a look of hatred she is frozen in her tracks: “at that moment I realized exactly who I was and how she saw me.” What is fascinating to me about this sequence is that the speaker begins with a notion of essential womanhood—it felt instinctive to want to go pick up the baby—but it ends with her recognition of differences between women that essential notions of innate

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female characteristics or even nonessential notions of feminine solidarity cannot erase. The Palestinian woman looks at her with hate, and in that look the speaker is able see herself as she is seen by the other. To See If I’m Smiling enables this kind of intersectional analysis even if the filmmaker’s stated explanation for her focus on women is simply that they (we) are more expressive and/or emotional than men and thus a better conduit of the experience of serving as an occupying force. Additionally, the compulsory nature of military service in Israel—for single Jewish women as well as men—is important for any attempt to analyze the differences among the subjects of these films, their function, and reception. Historically, military service has been intimately bound up in or even constitutive of citizenship in Israel, so much so that even some (certainly not all) self-identified leftists feel that they must do their service in order to legitimately protest the policy of occupation.40 Israeli citizens—both those serving in the territories and civilians—experience the increased rage and frustration of the Palestinian community when it results in terror and suicide bombings. The issue of the occupation thus touches a very broad spectrum of the Israeli population, both socioeconomically and ideologically. Compare this to the all-volunteer army (or what some more cynically call the “poverty draft”)41 in the United States, where, according to an estimate by the Iraq Veterans Against the War and others, less than one half of a percent of the population is serving in the active armed forces, the least amount in the last century, and the average soldier is more conservative politically than the populace at large.42 It is thus much easier for many US citizens to ignore not only the damage wrought by our foreign policy to the citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan, but even to our soldiers charged with carrying out that policy. Those opposed to these wars need not fight them. Under these conditions, films that focus on the trauma of soldier witnesses and perpetrators and the subsequent damage to the fabric of society are more likely to matter in the current Israeli situation than in the United States. The films about Abu Ghraib, however, have contributed to the outrage over abhorrent practices committed in the name of US citizens, especially in the face of government deception and secrecy,43 and they contribute to an understanding of how these practices did in fact, occur. In other words, they provide some sense of what Butler called for in her analysis of the photographs: “an account of how the norms of war in this instance neutralized morally significant relationships to violence and injurability.”44

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Ultimately, though, I think it is fair to ask about the morality and not just the political efficacy of texts that focus on the trauma of perpetrators in order to make a case against a government’s policies or practices. The “fact that occupation also corrupts the Israelis” (Khatib) or “If you’re in the territories you’ll be sullied by this thing and come out a different person” (Yarom) is indeed the moral stance of To See If I’m Smiling. There are no interviews with Palestinians and the optical point of view of much of the film is with Israeli soldiers, although moments of empathy for the occupied are also readily evident. Like Kennedy and Morris, Yarom effaces her enunciative presence in this film: there are only a few places where we hear her questions or her responses to something an interviewee has said. Yet by making Meytal’s story central through her organization of the film and its title, and by focusing on the ways in which a photograph may prompt memory and critical reflection, Yarom’s film goes beyond perpetrator trauma to trace the processes by which, the lives of others can become grievable,45 in Butler’s terms, opening the way to ethical and political solidarity and action. Morag rightly points to the lack of attention to perpetrator trauma within psychoanalytic literature and humanities trauma studies, which, for good reason historically, have been aligned with the trauma of victims.46 One place, however, where the trauma of perpetrators is considered is within certain branches of human rights discourse, where recent work argues that victim and perpetrator are not homogeneous categories and that some people can be both—for example, terrorism’s or a masculinist militarist society’s victims and simultaneously perpetrators of actual or symbolic violence on others.47 Such work insists that perpetrators’ testimony be included in a society’s “truth-telling mechanisms,” whether they be judicial processes or truth commissions, if that society is to recover from its traumatic history and evolve in a just and equitable direction, so long as its victims are not marginalized or forgotten by the process. Documentary films such as the three discussed here can serve as another such “truth-telling mechanism.” They raise important questions about individual morality and responsibility in the face of unconscionable policies and practices in conditions of war and occupation. They also contribute by presenting the gendered experiences of occupiers/soldiers in modern militaries and the reasons why some women, counter to the hopes and desires of some feminists, may be just as if not more likely to participate in or fail to stand up against (racialized) instances of aggression and abuse. And as with the example I used to begin this essay, whatever their intentions, these films will continue to be mobilized, both by those with the more limited goals of eliminating abuses and atrocities within

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established policy and those with the broader aims of ending the occupations that make such abuses inevitable.

Notes 1 All of these quotations come from Robert Mackey, “Israeli Ex-Soldier Defends Her Facebook Snapshots,” http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/israeli-ex-soldi er-defends-her-facebook-snapshots. 2 See for example, Susan Sontag, on the different uses of the same photograph(s): “The photographer’s intentions do not determine the meaning of the photograph, which will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it” (Regarding the Pain of Others [New York: Farrar, Straus and Girous, 2003], 39). Or, as Judith Butler has written specifically about the Abu Ghraib photographs, “On the one hand, they are referential; on the other, they change their meaning depending on the context in which they are shown and the purpose for which they are invoked” (“Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag,” in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? [London: Verso, 2009], 80). 3 For example, the film won awards at the Haifa International Film Festival, the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA), and the Human Rights International Film Festival and was screened at the San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, and Calgary Jewish Film Festivals in North America (among others) and on cable Channel 8 in Israel in November 2007. 4 Mackey, “Israeli Ex-Soldier.” 5 For example, Mackey’s “Israeli Ex-Soldier” blog prompted this exchange in the Readers’ Comments: “What will happen to the world when the women have become like men in their wish to dehumanize and degrade people?” This provoked an angry response from wow, MA, August 17, 2010: “That is so offensive. Really, do you think all men are like this? If so, I am very sorry for you indeed. In fact, it is too common for PEOPLE to dehumanize and degrade their ‘enemies’. SOLDIERS are trained to do this. It is what allows them to kill and maim without the normal remorse that a conscientious person would experience. MEN tend to be the ones expected to take on this role of soldiers in society, so by this mere fact, they do tend to be the ones left to find a way to deal with the horrors of war, and the aftermath. It is AWFUL to suggest this is an inherently ‘male’ quality to dehumanize or degrade others. What is wrong with you?”Similarly, Barbara Ehrenreich begins her foreword to One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers, ed. Tara McKelvey (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007), “Even those people we might have thought were

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Deeper than Oblivion impervious to shame, like the secretary of defense, admit that the photos of abuse in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison turned their stomachs. The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the US mission in Iraq—whatever exactly it is—but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women” (1). Others in the volume are critical of Ehrenreich for harboring such illusions in the first place. Hilary Neroni, “The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer: Documentary Form and the Logic of Enjoyment,” Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 3 (2009): 245–57. The other films Morag discusses are Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008) and Z32 (Avi Mograbi, 2008). Raya Morag, “Current Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Trauma of the Perpetrator,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Los Angeles, CA, March 18–21, 2010. After the completion of this chapter, a version of this essay appeared in print as Raya Morag, “Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema,” Camera Obscura 27, no. 80 (2012): 93–133. Tristan Anne Borer, for example, makes a distinction between “direct perpetrators” (those who carry out gross violations of human rights) and “indirect perpetrators” (those who know about and do nothing and/or order these acts). See Borer, “A Taxonomy of Victims and Perpetrators: Human Rights and Reconciliation in South Africa,” Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2003): 1101–2. For a particularly trenchant example of the debate over Standard Operating Procedure, see the “Conference Report: Reframing Standard Operating Procedure – Errol Morris and the Creative Treatment of Abu Ghraib,” Jump Cut 52 (2010), www.ejumpcut.org/ currentissue/index.html which includes an “Introduction,” by David Andrews, “Feelings of Revulsion and the Limits of Academic Discourse” by Bill Nichols, “Speech Images: Standard Operating Procedure and the Staging of Interrogation” by Jonathan Kahana, “‘Cluster Fuck’: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure,” by Linda Williams, and “Response to Papers and Comments on Standard Operating Procedure” by Irina Leimbacher. A longer version of Williams’s essay appears in Camera Obscura 25, no. 73 (2010): 29–67. This is a reference to an earlier sequence in which Meytal described being told to wash and clean up a corpse, “so they wouldn’t see what we did to him,” before returning the body to the Palestinian Authority. As Butler argues, “Forms of racism, instituted and active at the level of perception tend to produce iconic versions of populations who are eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, and who remain ungrievable” (“Introduction: Precarious Life, Grievable Life,” Frames of War, 24). In addition to the obvious disrespect implied by taking and displaying such photos, these and other “trophy shots” are arguably a violation of Article 13 of the Geneva Conventions which

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protects prisoners of war “particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and [my emphasis] against insults and public curiosity.” See in particular Neroni, “The Nonsensical Smile,” Williams, “‘Cluster Fuck,’” and Julia Lesage, “Torture Documentaries,” Jump Cut 51 (2009), www.ejumpcut.org/ currentissue/index.html. See also Howard Feinstein, “Beyond the Frame,” Sight and Sound 18, no. 7 (2008): 34–6 and Williams, “Cluster Fuck,” Camera Obscura, 54–7, for a discussion of Morris’s extra-filmic attempts to explain (and perhaps justify) Harman’s smile. Kahana, “Speech images.” See for example, Lesage, “Torture Documentaries;” Williams, “‘Cluster Fuck,’” and Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Standard Operating Procedure: Mediating Torture,” Film Quarterly 62 (2009): 39–44. This also has been my experience in showing Standard Operating Procedure to students: they do not accept the perspective of the interviewees as the perspective of the film. Kahana, “Speech images.” Lesage, “Torture Documentaries,” and Neroni, “The Nonsensical Smile.” At the end of the film Meytal goes to the house of a friend from her former army unit and pages through a photo album. Some of the images are revealed to the viewer, but one is shown face down and her friend asks if she should put it in an envelope for her. Yarom fades out and then in on Meytal looking at the photo from the envelope. “How in the hell did I ever think I’d be able to forget about it?” is Meytal’s response to the photo and the film’s final spoken words. Morag, “Current Israeli Documentary Cinema,” 2. See in particular Nichols, “Feelings of Revulsion.” I would argue that Kennedy’s film is not as vulnerable to this critique for several reasons, the most important of which is the way she introduces the notorious photos from Abu Ghraib. The first time we see one of them it is in the hands of the brother of one of the detainees, who says, “Yes, this is my brother,” and kisses the photograph. This shapes all subsequent viewings of the photographs as we are encouraged to see every single one of their subjects not as an anonymous Iraqi male but as somebody’s father, son, or brother. Of course Morris is at great pains to interrogate this notion of the photograph as evidence; for example, in his DVD commentary for the film he speaks about his interest in what the photographs both reveal and conceal, and this is particularly evident in the places in the film where the interviewees discuss the cropping of shots or the choice of photos selected for circulation. Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, “Introduction,” The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 4. In the same volume Guy Westwell quotes Michelle Citron on one of the ways home movies can function: “Time folds back on itself. Two places on the time line of

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Deeper than Oblivion our life meet. In this moment of super-imposition, a space is created from which insight can arise. This is the latent hope in all home movies.” Michelle Citron, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 15, cited in Westwell, “The Domestic Vision of Vietnam Home Movies,” in The Image and Witness, ed. Guerin and Hallas, 149–50. Women Soldiers’ Testimonies (2009), is described as a product of “Soldiers Speak Out,” the testimonies collection project of Breaking the Silence: “Since 2004, we have collected hundreds of testimonies from those who have, during their service in the IDF, the Border Guard, and the Security Forces, played a role in the Occupied Territories . . . The testimonies are all from women who served in various units and roles in the Occupied Territories since the year 2000” (www.breakingthesilence.org. il.) Each testimonial is numbered and the participants are identified by rank, unit, and location. The names are redacted. Testimony #84, pp. 116–17. The reference is to a moment in the film when education officer Dana Behar describes the looting of prayer beads and Korans by one of the units to which she was assigned. Another telling incident is one described by welfare officer Tal Ben Sira-Morag: Israeli soldiers change a tape and blast the Snap! song “I’ve Got the Power!” from a mosque. The heady intoxication of power is an important motif in To See If I’m Smiling; for example, as observer Rotem Livne describes her work: “It’s loads of power . . . There’s an incident about to happen and it will happen the way you make it happen . . . It’s loads of power . . . loads . . . And you try to do what’s right with it.” Similarly, operations sergeant Inbar Michelzon: “I remember thinking: ‘We’re in the Wild West. We can do whatever we feel like.’ Part of doing what you feel like was, for example, to stop our jeep next to a group of people, call them over with our finger (she gestures) to approach . . . This power, that you just motion with your finger and the person comes. No hesitation.” “I’ve Got the Power!” indeed. I am aware of one trend in critical Israeli thought that is wary of such analogies and sees them as evidence of ethnocentricism: that is, the only way to recognize the pain and suffering of the Palestinian other is through recourse to one’s own collective history and memory. See, for example, Raz Yosef ’s critique of Waltz with Bashir in “War Fantasies: Memory, Trauma and Ethics in Ari Foman’s Waltz with Bashir,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 3 (November 2010): 311–26 and Raz Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2011). In this case, and as an outsider to Israeli (but not Jewish) society and identity, I do not see this analogy that way: for me, it acknowledges perpetration of disrespect or abuse through analogy and empathy. Testimony #20, p. 32.

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27 I say “arguably” because Harman is presented in Morris’s documentary as objecting to some of the practices she witnessed and participated in through the medium of her letters home to her partner and through her role in the documentation of abuses through her own photography. Her explanation for her smile and thumbs up in this photograph and others still seems inadequate to me, however. See Philip Gourevitch and Morris’s more nuanced discussion of Harman’s confused and contradictory motives in “Exposure: The Woman behind the Camera at Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker (March 24, 2008), www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2008/03/24/080324fa_fact_gourevitch. 28 Both Ella Shohat and Dorit Naaman have written about Israeli film’s tormented “shoot-and-cry” soldiers “who supposedly suffer from the very fact of being conquerors, who do not hate those they occupy” (Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation [Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989], 259), the “sensitive and humane soldier, one who is forced to fight, but deeply regrets it” (Naaman, “New Masculinities in Israeli Cinema: Vocalizing Trauma, Silencing Ethics,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, New Orleans, LA, March 10–13, 2011, 14). 29 See for example, Borer, “A Taxonomy of Victims and Perpetrators,” 1101–2 for a discussion of the bitterness of the direct perpetrators toward those above them in the chain of command who were not held responsible for ordering or tolerating torture, atrocities, and human rights abuses. 30 The genesis of the film and Yarom’s own military service are described in Dalia Karpel, “My God, What Did We Do?” Haaretz, Friday Supplement, August 11, 2007, www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/my-god-what-did-we-do-1.232798. For a more confessional remorseful US documentary subject we might look to Robynn Murray, the traumatized Iraqi war veteran of Sara Nesson’s recent Oscar-nominated short Poster Girl (2010); for a more defensive Israeli veteran see the response of Eden Abergil as reported in Mackey, “Israeli Ex-Soldier Defends her Facebook Snapshots,” and Haaretz Service, “I don’t see anything wrong with Facebook images of Palestinian detainees,” Haaretz, August 17, 2010, www. haaretz.com/news/national/i-don-t-see-anything-wrong-with-facebook-image s-of-palestinian-detainees-1.308537. 31 Some of the stories presented anonymously in the collection of women soldiers’ testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence are identical to those related by women appearing in the film, so this is likely. 32 Tal Ben Sira-Morag is quoted as saying, “I did an officers’ course and since I’m leftist I didn’t want to serve in the territories, but I was convinced since I didn’t have much choice . . .” and of Inbar Michelzon, the article says, “though her views were quite leftist, there was no question that she would serve in the army . . .” and

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Deeper than Oblivion later she says, “I came to the army from a youth movement that touts equality and the value of every human being and I got a slap in the face” (Karpel, “My god”). In an early sequence in the film, Meytal describes why she was attracted to medical work and why she wanted to serve in the territories: “Just before the end of the course, one girl told us about her service in the Territories, how she goes with her helmet, vest and weapon to every incident, how she treats the wounded, choppers, operations, real action, ‘That’s where it’s happening . . . that’s where you have to go.’ I liked that.” She describes waiting for her assignment: “And he surprised me. I got Hebron . . . and I jumped for joy.” At this point we can hear the interviewer, skeptical, “Really?” Meytal replies, “yes.” Although these films do not explicitly announce a concern with gender and the Abu Ghraib scandal, it is certainly part of their interest and analysis. For example, in Standard Operating Procedure, Morris includes a lengthy sequence where Lynndie England reflects on how she got into the trouble she did, in explicitly gendered terms: “When I was in the brig . . . every single woman there was there because of a man . . . and when you join the military, no matter what anyone says, it’s a man’s world . . . You have to either equal a man or be controlled by a man . . .” Other interviewees discuss the different rules and roles for male and female interrogators, and the ways in which Orientalist assumptions about gender and sexuality in Arab cultures were employed to try to “break” or humiliate male detainees. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is the only army in the world to implement a law-binding compulsory drafting of women. The girls are recruited for a two-year period at the age of 18. Since 1967, the IDF has been operating in the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank (also known as The Territories), encountering the Palestinian population on a daily basis. Some of the girls are stationed in these regions.” These brief titles obviously elide some complexity (the draft is only compulsory for single Jewish Israeli women) and much history (why has the IDF been operating in the Territories and encountering the Palestinian population since 1967? What is meant by “encountering” this population? How has this “encountering” changed since the first and second intifadas? Etc.). Carmela Menashe is the highly respected military reporter for Israel Radio, the first female Israeli broadcaster to become a military correspondent. She has, according to an article in The Jerusalem Post, “exposed cases of mistreatment by offers, hazing by fellow recruits, humiliation, sexual abuse, medical negligence and many other personal issues that have made life in the army insufferable for many soldiers” (Greer Fay Cashman, “EMET Prize for Israel Radio reporter Carmela Menashe,” August 4, 2010, www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=183586). The gendered nuances of this story, in which a female soldier is ordered by a male commander to tell another male to doctor a report and in which she considers turning to a woman outside the army to expose it, are not conveyed by the English

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subtitles, which translate as “I even considered contacting a journalist.” Thanks to the editors of this volume for pointing this out to me. “One of the guys,” is also, as noted, the title of a book edited by Tara McKelvey which seeks to explain the participation of women in the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. See for example, Yoel Elizur and Nuphar Yishay-Krien, “Participation in Atrocities among Israeli Soldiers during the First Intifada: A Qualitative Analysis,” Journal of Peace Research (2009): 251–67. Morag, “Current Israeli Cinema,” 6. There is an extensive literature on the role of the military and militarism in Israeli society and culture and further, the extent to which the compulsory drafting but unequal participation of women in the military enfranchises or disenfranchises them. See for example, Edna Lomsky-Feder and Eyal Ben-Ari, eds., The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); Uta Klein, “The Military and Masculinities in Israeli Society,” in Military Masculinities: Identity and the State, ed. Paul R. Higate (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 191–200; Esther Fuchs, “Introduction”; Tamar Mayer, “From Zero to Hero: Masculinity in Jewish Nationalism”; Hanna Herzog, “Homefront and Battlefront: The Status of Jewish and Palestinian Women in Israel”; Simona Sharoni, “Homefront as Battlefield: Gender, Military Occupation, and Violence against Women”; Ayala Emmett, “Citizens of the State and Political Women”; Orna Sasson-Levy, “Gender Performance in a Changing Military: Women Soldiers in ‘Masculine’ Roles”; all in Israeli Women’s Studies: A Reader, ed. Esther Fuchs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); and Stuart A. Cohen, ed., The New Citizen Armies: Israel’s Armed Forces in Comparative Perspective (London: Routledge, 2010). For example, throughout their “Introduction: Feminism and US wars—Mapping the Ground,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Robin L. Riley put “volunteer” in quotation marks and note that: “Women’s participation as US soldiers in this war [Iraq and Afghanistan] has expanded under the economic pressures of the ‘poverty draft,’ with a disproportionate risk of assault and death falling on women of color, who were over 50 percent of US enlisted women in 2003,” Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism, edited by Robin L. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, (London: Zed, 2008), 9. “Why We Are Against the Wars,” Iraq Veterans Against the War website, www.ivaw. org/about/why-we-are-against-wars. Two recent articles confirm these figures and warn about the growing gap between the military and the civilian population: Mark Thompson, “The Other 1%,” Time Vol. 178, no. 20, November 21, 2011: 35–9; and Sabrina Tavernise, “As Fewer Americans Serve, Growing Gap Is Found Between Civilians and Military,” New York Times, November 25, 2011, A22. For an interesting dissenting view, one which argues that the ideal of the citizen-soldier is still alive despite the installation of the all-volunteer force in 1973, see Ronald

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Deeper than Oblivion R. Krebs, “The Enduring Citizen-Soldier Tradition in the United States,” The New Citizen Armies, 7–31. Krebs still ends by calling for a “non-militarized republicanism, in which the performance of public duty is prized but in which civic virtue is not limited to, nor exemplified by, military service” (24). This is similar to Orna Sasson-Levy’s call (“Gender Performance in a Changing Military”) for “new, nonmilitary definitions of Israeli citizenship” (274). Neroni makes this important point in her essay about the films as does Butler about the Abu Ghraib photographs. Butler, “Torture,” 82. By way of contrast, in her analysis of the most important ethical lesson of Standard Operating Procedure, Linda Williams argues, “It is unlikely that Harman would have smiled over the corpse of one of her compatriots. Al-Jamadi is not grievable to her, and we should perhaps not overly celebrate her small resistance. But through her his torture has become representable to us just beyond the frame, and that is an important achievement” (“Cluster Fuck,” 58). Both Morag and Yosef describe as an exception the work of historian Dominick La Capra and they cite the same passage: “There is the possibility of perpetrator trauma which must itself be acknowledged and in some sense worked through if perpetrators are to distance themselves from earlier implication in deadly ideologies and practices,” Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 79, cited by Morag, “Current Israeli Cinema,” 2; and Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma, 16–17. See for example Borer, “A Taxonomy of Victims and Perpetrators,” and the essays in Tristan Anne Borer, ed., Telling the Truths: Truth Telling and Peace Building in Post-Conflict Societies (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). See also Raya Morag, “The Living Body and the Corpse—Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Intifadah,” Journal of Film and Video 60, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2008): 3–24 on the difficulties of both Israeli documentary and Palestinian fictional cinema in constructing subject positions simultaneously opposing the occupation/ empathizing with Palestinian suffering and opposing suicidal terror/empathizing with the suffering of Israeli victims.

Bibliography Andrews, David. “Introduction and Overview to Conference Report: Reframing Standard Operating Procedure—Errol Morris and the Creative Treatment of Abu Ghraib.” Jump Cut 52 (2010). www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/sopAndrews/index. html.

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Benson-Allott, Caetlin. “Standard Operating Procedure: Mediating Torture.” Film Quarterly 62 (2009): 39–44. Borer, Tristan Anne. “A Taxonomy of Victims and Perpetrators: Human Rights and Reconciliation in South Africa.” Human Rights Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2003): 1101–2. Borer, Tristan Anne, ed. Telling the Truths: Truth Telling and Peace Building in Post-Conflict Societies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography: Thinking with Sontag.” In Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? 63–100. London: Verso, 2009. Citron, Michelle. Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Cohen, Stuart A., ed. The New Citizen Armies: Israel’s Armed Forces in Comparative Perspective. London: Routledge, 2010. “Conference Report: Reframing Standard Operating Procedure—Errol Morris and the Creative Treatment of Abu Ghraib,” Jump Cut 52 (2010), www.ejumpcut.org/ currentissue/index.html. Ehrenreich, Barbara. “Foreword: Feminism’s Assumptions Upended.” In One of the Guys: Women as Aggressors and Torturers, edited by Tara McKelvey, 1–5. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007. Elizur, Yoel and Nuphar Yishay-Krien. “Participation in Atrocities among Israeli Soldiers during the First Intifada: A Qualitative Analysis.” Journal of Peace Research (2009): 251–67. Feinstein, Howard. “Beyond the Frame,” Sight and Sound 18, no. 7 (2008): 34–6. Fuchs, Esther, ed. Israeli Women’s Studies: A Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Guerin, Frances and Roger Hallas, eds. The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Kahana, Jonathan. “Speech Images: Standard Operating Procedure and the Staging of Interrogation.” Jump Cut 52 (2010), www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/sopkKahana/ index.html. Klein, Uta. “The Military and Masculinities in Israeli Society.” In Military Masculinities: Identity and the State, edited by Paul R. Higate, 191–200. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. Krebs, Ronald R. “The Enduring Citizen-Soldier Tradition in the United States.” In The New Citizen Armies: Israel’s Armed Forces in Comparative Perspective, edited by Stuart A. Cohen, 7–31. Oxford: Routledge, 2010. La Capra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Leimbacher, Irina. “Response to Papers and Comments on Standard Operating Procedure” Jump Cut 52 (2010), www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/sopLimbacher/ index.html. Lesage, Julia. “Torture Documentaries.” Jump Cut 51 (2009), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc51.2009/TortureDocumentaries/index.html.

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Lomsky-Feder, Edna and Eyal Ben-Ari, eds. The Military and Militarism in Israeli Society. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Morag, Raya. “Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema.” Camera Obscura 27, no. 80 (2012): 93–133. —. “The Living Body and the Corpse—Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Intifadah.” Journal of Film and Video 60, no. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2008): 3–24. Neroni, Hilary. “The Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer: Documentary Form and the Logic of Enjoyment.” Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 3 (2009): 245–57. Nichols, Bill. “Feelings of Revulsion and the Limits of Academic Discourse.” Jump Cut 52 (2010), www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/sopNichols/index.html. Riley, Robin L., Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Minnie Bruce Pratt, eds. Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism. London: Zed Books, 2008. Sasson-Levy, Orna. “Gender Performance in a Changing Military: Women Soldiers in ‘Masculine’ Roles.” In Israeli Women’s Studies: A Reader, edited by Esther Fuchs, 265–76. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Shohat, Ella. Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Girous, 2003. Westwell, Guy. “The Domestic Vision of Vietnam Home Movies.” In The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture, edited by Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas, 143–55. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Williams, Linda. “‘Cluster Fuck’: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure.” Jump Cut 52 (2010), www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/ sopWilliams/index.html. —. “Cluster Fuck: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure.” Camera Obscura 25, no. 73 (2010): 29–67. Yosef, Raz. The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema. New York: Routledge, 2011. —. “War Fantasies: Memory, Trauma and Ethics in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, no. 3 (2010): 311–26.

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4

The Event and the Picture: David Perlov’s My Stills and Memories of the Eichmann Trial Anat Zanger

The art of Voici must be based on what it refused. Jacques Rancière1

Introduction David Perlov’s last film My Stills 1952–2002 is aesthetically unique in that it is made up of still photographs which the camera weaves into a cinematic essay.2 The film deals with moments in the director’s personal life and moments in the life of a Jewish, Israeli collective, between 1952 and 2002.3 The still photographs and cinematic sequences in both black and white and color constitute elements of Perlov’s personal archive, while at the same time they form part of a “visual dictionary,” as Anton Kaes defines a collection of images coming together in a visual medium.4 Perlov’s voice on the soundtrack anchors the visual material in a specific context and thus creates a cinematic testimony which is tugged back and forth between the present and the past and in between various locations. David Perlov immigrated to Israel from Brazil as a young adult after studying art in Paris. In his first years in Israel he worked for the National Broadcast Authority and from the start, even within the National institution, developed a singular and unique voice of his own. In his films such as In Jerusalem (1963), Tel Katzir (1964), and Biba (1977), Perlov portrayed collective issues such as homeland, Nationalism, Patriotism, and Bereavement through a personal perspective, trying through them to unravel the meaning of Israeli collective

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society. This inquiry led him to create independent films and to develop a sub-genre of cinematic memoir, in which the personal voice of the artist and his everyday observations determine the structure of the events. Especially noted are his cinematic journals Diary (1973–83) that have become a landmark of the Israeli documentary cinema. Throughout, he maintained his mentality as an immigrant and his three “Homelands” (Rio de Janeiro, Paris, and Tel Aviv) are recurrent locations interwoven in his films. Like his other films, the film discussed in this article, My Stills, raises questions about the relationship created between event and picture and enquires into the cinematic event: What is the cinematic event? What are the events that the cinematographer chooses to focus on? How are these events recorded on film? In this chapter, I will focus on the way in which the present and the past, individual and collective experience, and still photographs and the cinematic medium, are intertwined in the film My Stills. This technique was employed by Perlov in two earlier films: In Thy Blood Live (1962) and Silver Tray (1995). I will argue that the unique aesthetic which combines still photographs and cinematic sequences in the film creates a complex perception of time in which personal, everyday experiences are woven together in order to document collective history. Perlov wanders in the urban landscapes of Tel Aviv and Paris and captures his and our surroundings in his gaze. Using photography of the everyday and the incidental, he shows us what we have not previously seen, or taken notice of, and also what we did not wish to see or prefer to forget. As I will show, the use of still photography in the film is an aesthetic move which creates a unique cinematic temporality that involves the past and the present simultaneously. I will first examine the aesthetic created in the film by means of the dynamic between the still photographs and the moving pictures; I will then focus on Perlov’s wandering gaze in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s flâneur and examine the function of the “passage” (arcade) as part of a process of disclosure of the collective unconscious. I will take up Perlov’s standpoint with regard to the photographic event and testimony using the series of still photographs featured in My Stills as well as another of Perlov’s films which he cites: Memories of the Eichmann Trial (1979). Perlov’s work has received relatively little critical attention. This article seeks to contribute to that discourse, by following the analogy between aesthetic and historical perspectives in these two films.5

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The image: Between photographs and film Perlov’s video film My Stills examines the status of still photographs in the film, and the effect they have in relation to the events and the viewer’s understanding of them. Many films have situated a photograph at the center of the plot. One may recall in this context films such as Blow Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966); Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982, 1992); The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1982) and Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000). The still photographs in the above texts play a crucial role in the development of their plots. In contrast, the photographs in Perlov’s films foreground their relations vis-à-vis reality and the plot remains in the background. At the same time, the still photographs in these films, as in My Stills, lures us to continuously reexamine them.6 Perlov’s film, like Chris Marker’s La jetée (1964) before it, is unusual in that it is mostly made up of still photographs taken by a film camera. La jetée is a science fiction film which describes Paris after a Third World War. Black and white still photographs appear one after another and present the wanderings of the protagonist. He is seen alternating between two chronotopes: underground Paris where he is interrogated in the fictive present of the film, and the ruins of a Paris which no longer exists to which he is sent to explore.7 These spatio-temporal gaps produce an impossible narrative in which the protagonist’s death precludes the film. The still photographs are significant in this context: frozen moments allow one to return to different dimensions of space and time.8 The film is, for the most part, made up of still photographs, with one moment of movement in which the heroine’s eye opens and signals the way for a discussion of the relationship between cinema and still photography. In My Stills, Perlov uses still photographs taken between 1952 and 2002 as the film’s raw material, returning to these pictures with his video camera, thus lending the photographic present qualities of the past. As with La jetée, the film creates an unusual cinematic movement against the background of the still photographs. This movement is particularly prominent in two sequences: the opening, in which Perlov presents various aspects of his work in his studio and the sequence in which Perlov relates to the work of another stills photographer, Henry Roth, who documented events in the Lodz Ghetto during the Holocaust. One may ask what the particular qualities of still photography are and how they differ from the motion picture. Still photographs, as Roland Barthes notes, are understood by the viewer to be testimony, anthropological proof of “having

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been there,” as opposed to film which creates a sense of current experience: “that of the here and now.”9 Due to the direct affinity between image and reality, or its indexicality as defined by the semiotic approach, the concreteness of the image is affirmed. While the cinematic movement situates the moment in the context of a specific, historical space and time, the photograph freezes the moment and extricates it from its natural duration. Moreover, as Raymond Bellour argues, the still photograph, when framed by the film, detaches the viewer from the film’s events and places the viewer at a distance from the film. By creating an alternative time, it allows the viewer to become aware of cinematic time and of being in the cinema itself.10 The question then arises of whether, in the wake of these distinctions, we can argue that cinema is a medium of the present, while still photography is always directed at the past. If so, how should we relate to a film like My Stills which mainly consists of still photographs, albeit screened at the rate of 24 frames a second? In this context, the questions which My Stills poses are these: What are the medium’s limitations and boundaries? In order to record reality, which components are optional, which are essential, and which can be eliminated? And can still photographs compose a film? As avant-garde and documentary cinema, including Perlov’s own work (in Diary 1973–1983 for example) has shown us, cinema does not necessarily require a written plot or protagonists beyond those we meet in everyday life. However, would a film be a film without movement? Would it be a film without cinematic time? Perlov does not forgo cinematic time, but rather, creates an alternative time. In My Stills, as in La Jette before it, the still photographs become the leading actors. Cinematic time is created in the intervals between these pictures: while the visual track follows the still photographs frames, the soundtrack in both films is based on voiceover and music that accentuate the significance of the pictures. Perlov’s stills camera alights on everyday events and records them so that the film frames them visually and vocally. Fragments of film or video taken with a handheld camera in My Stills can sometimes appear like still photographs. Images screened on television also serve as a source for Perlov’s camera. He takes the images out of their original context and treats them in a similar manner to his treatment of still photographs (e.g. a picture he uses of an Afghan child). In this way the integration of the still photographs in a sequence of the film, as with the treatment of the cinematic sequence in which the camera and the filmed object are static, create a hybrid medium which transposes features of one medium onto those of another, blurring the distinctions between them. This is

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the Janus face of cinema, with still photographs turning toward the present and the past simultaneously.

The aesthetic of delayed cinema “Acceleration and deceleration, or the movement of movement, are the only dimensions of space,” observes Paul Virilio, adding that the significant dimensions of speed-space are the incidental and intensity, measured as changes in speed.11 For Virilio, the cinematic or digital image is elusive and unstable; therefore its ontological status is also questionable. Advanced technology such as the invention of the cinema, television, the internet, and virtual reality, have undone the ability to create a direct gaze and have distorted the previously understood meaning of pictures. In this sense, My Stills, which turns to still photography, goes against the grain: as it posits changes in speed against the flow of time, by means of deceleration.12 The cinematic medium produces 24 variations on a potential motion per second. In any given shot, every frame is a prior version of what will be seen in the next (imagine for example a hand gesture or a blink). These differences are what distinguishes cinema as an art form, although they are usually repressed in favor of continuity, as Jean-Louis Baudry has shown.13 In this sense, My Stills, like La jetée before it, is loaded with the tension between continuity and immobility; of movement which suppresses and blurs the difference between still photographs presented in sequence at a rate that emphasizes both the difference and the similarity between them. Perlov’s video camera highlights the framing action of the still photographs, lingering over the correct way to situate them. Furthermore, some of the still photographs are taken with an Olympus pan camera which takes two pictures, one next to the other, in the same frame, producing 72 pictures in a reel of 36. This draws attention to the way in which cinematic continuity is created and deferred, frame by frame. In this way Perlov creates an aesthetic of “delaying cinema” as defined by Laura Mulvey.14 This is a cinema which suspends the flow of events and directs attention to various aspects of the cinematic medium. The event, the picture, cinematic continuity, editing and the gaze of the viewer are all highlighted in My Stills. In modernity, our idea of time is structured around the particular concept of “the moment.” Photography’s division of time and space has been instrumental to this concept, while in cinema, moments are identified and reproduced by

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series of continuous frames. Gilles Deleuze identifies two diachronic types of cinema: the movement-image that is defined by the relationship of image to time and space in what we might call the “classic narrative” of mainstream cinema. The second type of cinema identified by Deleuze was developed from the ruins of postwar Europe. This cinema is characterized by a new concept of time that is fragmented and fractured. Time-image, as coined by Deleuze, encapsulates a rupture in the accepted knowledge and perception of time and memory.15 In postmodernist culture, time becomes spatialized and the concept of “the real” has been challenged.16 Jonathan Crary adds another dimension to the discussion of modernity, postmodernity, and photography. In his Techniques of the Observer, he notes that the observer himself or herself, alongside the camera and its equipment, is a crucial participant in the production of the image.17 However nowadays, in a world in which more and more aesthetic techniques erase reality and often create hyper-reality, one might ask how an observing entity fits into this economic, industrial, and technological machine. “If there is in fact an ongoing mutation in the nature of visuality, what forms of modes are being left behind? What kind of a break is it?”18 Crary asks and adds “what are the elements of continuity that link contemporary imagery with older organizations of the visual? To what extent, if at all, are computer graphics and the contents of the video display terminal a further elaboration and refinement of what Guy Debord designated as the ‘society of the spectacle’?”19 Therefore, when Perlov, toward the beginning of the twenty-first century, lingers over the photographed object on an angle of gaze, on a composition or a lens, on the film and on himself as observer, he refuses to become another “element” in the creation of his work of art and becomes involved in an aesthetic process opposed to this tendency. In this way, he returns to a Modernist moment in a postmodern era. “My Studio,” the sequence which introduces the film, is continued throughout two additional sequences. It is particular in its cinematic expression which highlights cinematic motion. Perlov uses this sequence to examine cinematic activity, including the studio, the new camera which he has learned to operate, the lighting, the object being filmed (the Loquat tree outside his window), the sound (Chopin, followed by a Ukrainian song on the radio), the cameramen, the editor, and even the economic aspect of his endeavor (“that is the gift you are giving me, alright, we’ll make do with it, we’ll make do with a little,” says Perlov to his interlocutor). Perlov uses the opening sequence to state his intentions: My Stills will return to the origins of cinema and examine the relation between the

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artist’s present and his past, between the present of the medium and the medium which preceded it.20 This interrogation serves as an opportunity to investigate an everyday present which, once filmed, immediately as well as with the passage of time, becomes testimony to our collective past. In order to investigate this process in the film, I will focus on the presence of the observer through the series of pictures in it; two in particular; first, the series of pictures in the London Ministores Passage of Ibn Gvirol Street in Tel Aviv and secondly, the series of pictures that deal with Henry Roth. Both series appear toward the middle of the film. My Stills is formed mostly by series of pictures which frame events from various angles. Recalling Claude Monet’s technique in his Water Lilies series (1903–8) or Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup series (1962, 1968), Perlov’s film constitutes its own seriality by repetition and difference.21 My Stills includes mini series that are presented as part of a cinematic passage of time, while simultaneously acting against it. These include the series of the director’s studio (“My Studio”); the London Ministores series; the Tel Aviv house and street; the Parisian hotel and street; the series of Emil Zola’s pictures; the series of the stills-photographers Henry Latig and Henry Roth. The seriality sets the pictures alongside one another, one version next to another, and highlights qualities that would be indiscernible in individual photographs. The framing of reality in My Stills takes place on two levels. First, a diegetic framing of the world of the film and the events that take place in it, and the second, a framing of reality which is already a framed reality, meaning reality as seen on television, in Perlov’s own still photographs or those by other photographers. Framing and reframing leaves traces of the photographer’s gaze while providing personal expression of urban reality. These acts resonate with the wanderer in the city, as described by Walter Benjamin documenting the experience of the stroller or flâneur in new urban centers.22 “For Benjamin,” notes Tom Gunning, “the flâneur marked a transitional phase of modern urban geography, like the arcades in which he strolled, disappearing as Paris fully entered into modernity.”23 Benjamin distinguishes in Baudelaire three types of gazes: an incidental gaze of the flâneur, a curious gaze of the badaud (or gawker) that emerges into a stare, and the penetrating inquisitive glare of the detective. Gunning continues: “For Benjamin the transformation of the flâneur into a detective involves not only mastery of observation but also a penetration of deceptive appearances.”24 The detective is often disguised as a gentleman stroller himself, in order to uncover an identity. Perlov’s gaze may be

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categorized with the incidental gaze of the flâneur—he does not try to tame the event or to reconstruct it with his camera; he does not seek to transform it into a fabulous vision but rather waits and allows events to direct him.25 By means of this gaze, he investigates the events which take place in front of the camera. At the same time, the constant return to a particular image or event frequently creates a focused, determined gaze, that of a detective investigating the reality around him. This gaze is recorded a number of times in My Stills via reflections in a mirror: at home, in a lift, in a Parisian café or hotel, showing the camera and Perlov’s face behind it, returning his own gaze as if it was a perfect fulfillment of Dziga Vertov’s vision of the mechanical “kino-eye.”26 Furthermore, the kino eye was understood as a “slow-motion eye.” In a similar way to the still photograph it presents a delayed cinema. In her book, Annette Michelson observes that: “[. . .] kino eye, from the very moment of its conception, was not a matter of trick effects, or of kino-eye for its own sake. Slow motion filming was understood as the opportunity to make the invisible visible, the unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt.”27

The passage: A dialectic of inside and outside What does the camera’s gaze expose in My Stills, and in which space is it located? The city is prominent in the stills pictures as a recurrent presence in the film. Perlov marks it with his gaze, characterizes through people’s movements either indoors or outside, in homes or cafés. Cities contain movement and human activity in the present; this spatial activity, as the French Marxist and sociologist Henry Lefebvre would put it, is always social.28 Perlov is both the observer and the flâneur: he “uses” the city as he records his steps with his camera. In a similar way to Michel de Certeau, who sought to understand the city by the various ways space is experienced and practiced, Perlov identifies the city as “a network of interwoven writings,” as he creates with his camera “a space of enunciation” between people and places.29 In the studio, the café, or the entry way to London Ministores in Tel Aviv, by means of long stares mediated by the camera through a door, an open or half open window, or through a reflection in a mirror; a dialectic is created in the film between the inside and the outside which invade each other and merge. For example, Perlov examines the Parisian café and his camera is reflected in a mirror so that it captures the inside and the outside at the same time. Similarly, in the

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London Ministores Passage in Tel Aviv, Perlov’s camera lingers on the street, on the entryway and on Avraham the guard, only to return once more to the street. The entrance to the London Ministores Passage reminds us of Parisian arcades and the alleys that formed a subject of observation for Walter Benjamin; the passages that were built in the nineteenth century, served as early commercial centers and were later abandoned. These roofed passages form a marked off urban space which is at once public and isolated; an outdoors which provides an illusion of indoors. “The whole center of the arcade is empty. I rush quickly to the exit, [. . .] At the exit, at the windows of the great travel agency, I breathe more easily; the street, freedom, the present,” in the words of Franz Hessel.30 The roofed arcades and the shops in them were for Benjamin a material realization of “the unconscious of the dreaming collective.”31 Perlov wanders in the Tel Aviv passage, as Benjamin strolled in the Parisian arcades three quarters of a century earlier. This is not a Parisian arcade, but here too the stroller focuses on the roofed shops and the goings on around them, in the shop windows, in the entry way to the passage, the salespeople, a few pedestrians wandering in and out; he acknowledges acquaintances by name and tries to read the secret of the faces of the passersby whom he does not know. As Jacques Rancière notes, photography is a unique technique. It constitutes a “dual poetics, by making the faces of anonymous people speak twice over—as silent witness of a condition inscribed directly on their features, their clothes, their life setting; and as possessors of a secret we shall never know, a secret veiled by the very image that delivers them to us.”32 For Perlov, as for Benjamin before him, the passage is a site which exposes the unconscious of the dreaming collective. In his own voice, he wonders about the signification of the sights he is recording with his camera. At the opening of the film, Perlov tells us that he was born in Rio de Janeiro, and later moved to Paris. At first he was not accepted into higher education in postwar Paris because he did not have the requisite documents (“as though I hadn’t been born at all”). Thus when he examines the faces in a Tel Aviv street near his house and in Paris near his hotel they arouse his curiosity as an immigrant and a film maker: “Oh, faces . . . oh long fingers.” In the London Ministores Passage the excitement often becomes curiosity: “where is he from; where is she from; are they Yemenite? Or Georgian?” He pays attention to the exotic sounds of distant places: “Novosibirsk, where is Novosibirsk? Are those Romanian foreign workers?” he asks, “How old are they? . . . Columbian?” He lingers particularly over Avraham the guard, seated at the entrance, checking the bags of those coming in.

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Streets and faces allow a digression from the “main plot” they are a part of. In fact the city, like the faces, incorporates a social landscape within it.33 By means of this dialectic between inside and outside, Perlov navigates between the house and the street, the eye and space, while framing the everyday reality around him. He follows the coincidental instances of life with his camera as he returns to familiar places, investigates and maps his immediate environment. This reality, however, produces the same pictures over and over again in My Stills. Thus, the familiar, neighborhood territory is invaded by violent reality; a reality that situates the guard Avraham at the threshold, between the interior and exterior of the London Ministores Passage. A reality that is encapsulated in the body language of foreign workers, people sitting in cafés, and Tel Aviv pedestrians in contrast to Parisian ones; a reality that introduces the violent events of September 11 to a television screen in a Paris hotel, and penetrates Perlov’s home via the television screen. The sights to which Perlov’s camera returns expose the recorded contemporary “optical unconscious.”34 I would like to use the arcade and the passage in a manner similar to that of Benjamin and Perlov, and through them to reach the dialectic produced between the everyday present, the unconscious, collective memory in My Stills.

The event: The everyday and the historic In a chapter of her book on contingency in cinema, Mary Ann Doane notes that not every event is processed or assimilated. The event, she adds, achieves its full significance only in retrospect. One of the great paradoxes of the cinematic event is that on one hand it incorporates the random and the unpredictable, while on the other hand the framed film of a given length, forces concrete structure and form onto the event.35 Allegedly, Perlov chooses to remove the event from his film and to focus on the photograph, but the event reemerges again and again. His refusal to deal with the event and look at the momentary instead creates a tension between the event and the photograph. However, in retrospective the event gains its full signification. Against the Israeli experience, he seemingly focuses on the everyday, or the “small time” as Zeli Gurevitz puts it.36 The “Israeli present,” says Gurevitz, “resists the present, denies the everyday. Not that there is no everyday: there is a routine, there are schools and clinics and work places and a street and road workers, and people pass their days this way for years, but as a cultural articulation or experience it remains open, like

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a book which refuses to be finished. The present is wide open to the future.”37 Nonetheless, the everyday, coincidental present recorded in the moving images and still photographs in My Stills is also directed toward a collective past, toward “big time.”38 As we have seen, Perlov deals with the media of photography and cinema in My Stills using pictures that he frames in cinematic time with his camera and his voice. Perlov’s photography, however, also includes still photographs by and tributes to photographers he liked and admired. He lingers first over Emil Zola, who photographed his family and intimate surroundings in black and white, as Perlov does in his filmed memoir (Diary and Updated Diary). Later on, Perlov mentions three stills photographers whose work he characterizes: Seymour (Seym) Chatman, whose work is presented via a close up of a child’s face in black and white (“the war child”) and Henri Latigue who photographs the everyday and the surprising, like the umbrellas which Perlov photographs on a rainy day in Tel Aviv. Perlov says that “even when the sea is stormy he [Latigue] photographs joy in life.” The third, Henry Roth, is introduced by Perlov, as a photographer who does not take photographs: “The photographer who documented the Lodz Ghetto and from that moment did not take one additional photograph.” Roth, as Perlov notes, was ordered by the Nazis to photograph the extermination of the Jews. However, along with the documentation of their deaths, he also photographed events in the Lodz Ghetto with a hidden camera. In choosing these three photographers, Perlov creates a key to decipher the still photographs in his film (and perhaps in all of his oeuvre): photographs which contain a familial, intimate sphere; photographs that include mundane moments in the public sphere; and photographs that document collective and significant events in it. Perlov’s cinematic enunciation distinguishes Roth from the other directors. Perlov introduces Roth in his film by including his photographs and interviews which he conducted with the photographer and his wife. The sequence that portrays Roth is one of two sequences in the film that include actual and spatial cinematic movement.39 At the interplay of cinema and photography, which occurs between Perlov’s own work and the cultural and aesthetic milieu in which he operates, Perlov chooses to refer to the work of another photographer by way of quotations from his own film, Memoirs of the Eichmann Trial (1979). The subject of that film and the photographs it includes are emotionally charged, as is Perlov’s treatment of testimony and memory.

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The memory of the image in Memories of the Eichmann Trial (1979) In this film, made 18 years after the Eichmann trial, Perlov documents a small number of witnesses who gave evidence at the trial (among them Henry Roth himself), and focuses on the testimonies of a group of second-generation Holocaust survivors who attended the trial. For them, the trial was part of their “post-memory” of the Holocaust, having grown up in the shadow of a narrative that took place before they were born.40 Throughout Memories of the Eichmann Trial, as well as in the sequences from it incorporated into My Stills, Perlov focuses on the impressions of witnesses at the trial, while the trial itself is presented for the most part only tangentially. Perlov films testimony about testimony. His work in My Stills frames in video, what has already been framed in cinema: Roth’s photographs from the Lodz Ghetto and his testimony about events there. Holding negatives from the Ghetto in his hands, Roth tells of how he secretly took other pictures, while carrying out the task imposed on him by the Germans of photographing the Jews who were being sent to their deaths. His photographic record of the genocide endangered his life, so he took steps to hide his actions. He buried these photographs, which were to provide testimony for generations to come, and thus acted in direct opposition to the intention often declared by the Nazi officers: to destroy not only all Jews, but also all testimony.41 But as Perlov says in the film, “the number of dire events greatly exceeded the number of cameras.” As in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1987), Perlov presents the Holocaust as beyond representation. In Memoirs of the Eichmann Trial, as may be gathered from the title, and later in My Stills, Perlov does not attempt to present the Eichmann trial, still less the events of the Holocaust; instead he focuses on the memories of second-generation witnesses.42 The still photographs are present in the films as indexical traces that constitute a metonymic affinity with the past, but the thoughts, fears, and apprehensions of Henry Roth and his wife are indivisible from the memories and continuous trauma of the event. Against the background of still photographs from the Ghetto, the soundtrack includes Henry Roth’s testimony from the witness stand at the Eichmann trial (1961) as well as his testimony in the documentary film made almost two decades later. In this film, Roth tells Perlov’s camera how Eichmann stared at him while he was giving evidence at the trial, as though he did not forgive him for staying alive. His wife adds that during the trial, all her sensations from those days returned (“I felt as if I were next in line”). Perlov’s

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camera focuses on the still photographs, panning between them as though they were events in a film taking place in sequence, and moving from them to Roth, as he demonstrates how the pictures were taken using a hidden camera. The black and white still photographs demand interpretation and explanation, but Roth’s testimony, like any testimony, includes that about which it is impossible to bear witness.43 The fact that the testimony is mediated through both the camera and a translator highlights the impossibility of giving testimony. Roth moved to Israel just a few years before the film was made and still did not speak Hebrew well. His wife helped him from time to time and an interpreter’s voice is also heard in the film. “Who is this” Perlov asks Roth, while on screen we see the face of a young woman. “My wife, my own wife,” Roth answers. “Your wife,” says Perlov. “Your own wife?” asks Roth, puzzled and Perlov, an immigrant himself, who still has traces of a foreign accent, identifies in his laugh with the new immigrant and his difficulties with Hebrew. Thus Perlov’s identification with Henry Roth’s language difficulties demonstrates the ethical standpoint of his camera both with regard to his subjects—“Photograph others as though you were photographing yourself ”— and to the event itself, as he demonstrates the impossibility of bearing witness to the Holocaust. His standpoint echoes Agamben’s claim about a subject’s ability to bear testimony of the Holocaust: “Testimony is only a meeting between the two impossibilities of bearing witness: since in order to bear witness, language must give way to non-language, to point out the impossibility of bearing witness.”44

Conclusion: Photographs as testimony of testimony In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Roland Barthes defines studium as the viewer’s general interest in the photograph, his educated, cultured attempt to interpret it and his motivation to understand the intent of the photographer.45 Punctum, on the other hand, he defines as an element that disturbs the stadium, “for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).”46 Both these aspects are in the domain of the viewer, of the space in which the photograph is received. In My Stills Perlov shares the signification of the photographs for him, and thus broadens the space of reception of the film for us. While the visual channel defines and delineates the duration of the observation act, the soundtrack anchors the film to present Perlov’s particular interpretation of the photographs, so that the film includes both the studium and the punctum.

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Whereas through the visual channel Perlov allows each viewer his own range of signification, via the soundtrack and voiceover, he presents his own findings and interpretation. Thus, he exposes a multilayered documentation of reality that deals both with the way events are framed and with the framing of events that were framed before. Thus, the cinematic sequence from Memories of the Eichmann Trial in which Perlov reshoots fragments from his own work, serves as the punctum of the film. In this sequence Perlov holds his film back, producing a delayed cinema both of My Stills and that which was presented in is earlier film, Memories. When he examines the components of an event in his film, he enables a measure of distance for the spectator. By halting cinematic continuity, the past trauma, the Holocaust, infiltrates the present and interacts with those of the present—terror attacks, exile, and placeless-ness. At the same time, through this device he emphasizes the impotence of the cinematic documentation act to function as a trace for an event that has ceased to exist. In his last film, My Stills, Perlov retrospectively examines the components of his own cinematic work. Using the sequence of Roth’s photographs, Perlov points to the way in which he sees the relationship between reality and its documentation. “I am not a correspondent,” he says, “I am not a journalist,” he declares. Wandering in his immediate surroundings (“By the House, by the Hotel”, as the exhibition of his work at the Sam Spiegel Film School was titled), he keeps a cinematic diary which logs his daily life, the “small time.” At the same time, these events accumulate significance and gradually become “big time.” This shift between “big” and “small” time, is caused by the double perspective of time in My Stills: the gap of time that existed between shooting the still photographs and the film itself in addition to the past as a quality inherent in every still photograph. In this context, Perlov uses his video camera to unite the still photographs into subjective cinematic space. This combination is particularly present in the two sequences discussed above, “My Studio” and the sequence on Roth from Memories of the Eichmann Trial, in which the work of the camera is more accentuated than in others. Through these sequences Perlov emphasizes the ethical viewpoint of his camera, that is, revealing what we have forgotten or what we prefer not to see. The photographs in My Stills usually portray, not a staged or predicted event, but rather a contingent one, which introduces itself, incidentally, to the wandering filmmaker. The moving visual channel is comprised of series of photographs that serve as a means to understand the realities of our lives. These photographs, which Perlov isolates from the reality around us, freezes with his stills camera, and re-records as moving images, include traces of his and our realities. Offered as multicolored kaleidoscope pieces of umbrellas, pedestrians, cars, cafés, and

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human faces, photographs of the streets of Tel Aviv and Paris expose the horror of our lives. Relinquishment of narrative, plot, and historical–chronological sequence, is an inevitable result of Perlov’s reduction of the camera movement. Still photography isolates the moment, highlights the incidental, and transforms it into the inevitable. Freezing the moment, and then exploring it with a moving film camera, creates a fatal spiral: thus, the film must return again and again to those moments that have been frozen in time. As a result of Perlov’s decision to include the “how it was” still photographs in the “here and now” import of the cinematic medium,47 My Stills cannot produce new pictures or rearticulate reality. It can only go back in an attempt to interpret those same photographs whose isolated, penetrating qualities Perlov’s cinema frames for us. The reading I have suggested here, is made possible in the space created between the still photographs as well as between the photographs and the soundtrack; between this film and other cinematic works; between the film My Stills and other films by Perlov; between Benjamin’s Parisian arcade and the London Ministores Passage. The film camera functions in this space as a time machine that brings us back to the sights we refuse to see, or those that have become too familiar to observe. David Perlov photographed and cinematically framed postcards for his viewers: not only postcards of the cafés of Paris and Tel Aviv, but also those of foreign workers, postcards from hospital corridors, and contact sheets from the Lodz Ghetto, to watch and see over and over again.

Notes 1 Jaques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007 [2003]), 13. 2 The term “stills,” based among other sources, on the director’s terminology, is used throughout the paper to define photographs, as opposed to cinematography. 3 On the connection between the personal and the collective in Perlov’s film, see Shuka Glotman, David Perlov: Colour Photographs 2000–2003, Exhibition Catalogue (Tel Hai, 2003), 21. 4 Anton Kaes, “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination,” History and Memory 2, no. 1 (1990): 111–29. 5 See for example Uri Klein, “Conversations with David Perlov,” Kol-no-A [in Hebrew] 19 (1981): 17–29; Meir Wigoder, “Diary and the Everyday,” Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew] 18 (2001): 139–53. 6 Antonioni’s film Blow Up, for example, asks whether a murder took place in the park or whether Thomas the photographer only imagined it in the enlarged

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Deeper than Oblivion photograph. Kubrick’s The Shining (1982) provokes questions about the relationship between Jack and the past and present residents of the hotel, while the stills picture at the end of the film provides a solution to the puzzle. In Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982, 1992), there is a chase after androids. In an attempt to distinguish between humans and androids, the photograph is used as evidence of human memory. In Nolan’s Memento (2000) as well, stills pictures constitute a last refuge from amnesia. Leonard, the film’s hero, who suffers from short-term amnesia, uses a polaroid camera to aid recall. A term coined by Bakhtin in Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258. For analysis of aspects of time in this film see David Norman Rodowick, “Time and Memory, Orders and Powers,” in Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 79–119. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977 [1964]), 44. Raymond Bellour, “The Pensive Spectator,” in The Cinematic (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), ed. David Campany (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007 [1984]), 119–23. Following Campany, one may ask, if today, when one can watch a film over and over again on DVD or other means, it becomes an object of the gaze like a photograph (Campany, “Introduction,” 13). Paul Virilio, The Lost Dimension, trans. Daniel Moshenberg (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), 102. He notes the changes in the visual and mental picture which result from slowed exposure of the photograph. As Glotman has pointed out, stills pictures are a form which may meet Perlov’s needs with respect to the power of the picture: “the cinematic moving photograph and television film have reached saturation point, so that they lack all the sanctity of the picture” (Glotman, David Perlov, 25). Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” trans. Alan Williams, in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 531–42. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), 163. Gilles Deleuze, The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989). See also Damian Sutton, Photography, Cinema, Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

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16 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT, 2001), 325. 17 John Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999). This observation will be developed and related to Walter Benjamin’s conception of the flâneur later in this chapter. 18 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 2. 19 Ibid. 20 This is similar to the film made as a tribute to the Lumière brothers, directed and produced by Philip Poulet and Didier Perry in 1995 to commemorate 100 years of cinema (Philip Poulet and Didier Perry, Lumière et Companie). They asked 40 well-known directors, including Wim Wenders, Arthur Penn, Claude Lalouche, Theo Angolopolos, and David Lynch to use the Lumière brothers’ original camera, with its limited depth of field, fast motion and film length of only 52 seconds. Through this process the directors returned to use the original means of early cinema, against the direction of dominant technologies that tends to add more and more senses and channels to the cinematic experience. 21 Klaus Honnef, Andy Warhol 1928–1987: Commerce into Art (Basic Art) (Koln: Taschen, 1991). 22 See Wigoder, “Diary and the Everyday,” 139–53. 23 Tom Gunning, “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls,” Wide Angle 19, no. 4 (1997): 28. 24 Ibid., 34. 25 As noted by Mary Ann Doane in relation to the cinematic event documented at the start of the last century, in The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 26 Vertov was a film director and theoretician who identified the function of the camera with that of the eye. See his film The Man with the Movie Camera (1926). See also Annette Michelson, ed., Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, trans. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 27 Michelson, Kino Eye, 130. 28 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Basil, 1991 [1974]). 29 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley CA, University of California Press, 1984), 66. 30 Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 38. This is a description which reflects an understanding of the arcades during the 1930s. 31 Buck-Morss, The Dialectic of Seeing, 39. 32 Rancière, The Future of the Image, 15.

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33 I am following Siegfried Kracauer’s observation regarding a similarity between the face and the city as social landscape in Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 34 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schoken, 1969 [1936]). 35 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, 140–71. 36 Zali Gurevitz, “The Israeli Present,” in On Israeli and Jewish Place [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2007), 81–102. 37 Gurevitz, “The Israeli Present”, 84 (my translation). 38 Ibid., 81–102 (my translation). 39 The other sequence described above in this context is “My Studio.” 40 Marianne Hirsch, “Surviving Images: Holocaust Memories and the Work of Post-Memory,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37; Régine-Mihal Friedman, “Witnessing for the Witness: Choice and Destiny by Tsipi Reibenbach,” Shofar, special issue on Israeli cinema 24, no. 1 (2005): 81–93. 41 As described by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Sphere Books, 1989). 42 See Friedman’s discussion, following Marianne Hirsch, of the inter-subjective space created in second-generation testimony. Scholars such as Nurith Gertz, Judd Ne’eman, Régine-Mihal Friedman, and Moshe Zimmerman have looked at the presence of the Holocaust in Israeli cinema. Friedman presents the characteristics of second-generation films about the Holocaust in her work. I would like to add to this discussion Perlov’s 1979 film as an early example of Israeli cinema which to the best of my knowledge has not been previously studied. For studies of the Holocaust and second generation see Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew] (Ramat Aviv: Open University of Israel, 1993) and Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004); Moshe Zimmerman, Don’t Touch My Holocaust: The Influence of the Holocaust on Israeli Cinema and Society [in Hebrew] (Haifa: Haifa University Press, 2002); Judd Ne’eman, “The Tragic Sense of Zionism; Shadow Cinema and the Holocaust,” Shofar 24, no. 1 (2005): 22–36; Régine-Mihal Friedman, “Images of Destruction/Destruction of Images,” Assaph: Kolnoa 2 (2001): 247–56 and “Witnessing for the Witness: Choice and Destiny by Tsipi Reibenbach.” 43 As Jean-François Lyotard notes in Giorgio Agamben, Remants of Auschwitz: The Archive and the Witness (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 44 Agamben, Remants of Auschwitz, 54. 45 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, Noonday Press, 1993), 25–8. 46 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27. 47 Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” 33–52.

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Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Archive and the Witness. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Edited by Michael Holquist, 84–258. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, Noonday Press, 1993. —. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath, 33–52. London: Hill and Wang, 1977 [1964]. Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Translated by Alan Williams. In Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Vol. 2, edited by Bill Nichols, 531–42. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Bellour, Raymond. “The Pensive Spectator.” In The Cinematic (Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), edited by David Campany, 119–23. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2007 [1984]. Benjamin, Walter. Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in an Era of High Capitalism. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Verso, 1997. —. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken, 1969. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectic of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles. The Movement-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. —. The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Friedman, Régine-Mihal. “Images of Destruction/Destruction of Images.” Assaph: Kolnoa, 2 (2001): 247–56. —. “Witnessing for the Witness: Choice and Destiny by Tsipi Reibenbach.” Shofar, Special Issue on Israeli Cinema 24, no. 1 (2005): 81–93. Gertz, Nurith. Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004.

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—. Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew]. Ramat Aviv: Open University Press, 1993. Glotman, Shuka. David Perlov: Colour Photographs 2000–2003, Exhibition Catalogue. Tel Hai, 2003. Gunning, Tom. “From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913).” Wide Angle 19, no. 4 (1977): 25–63. Gurevitz, Zali. “The Israeli Present.” In On Israeli and Jewish Place [in Hebrew], 81–102. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2007. Hirsch, Marianne. “Surviving Images: Holocaust Memories and the Work of Post-Memory.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 5–37. Honnef, Klaus. Andy Warhol 1928–1987: Commerce into Art (Basic Art). Koln: Taschen, 1991. Kaes, Anton. “History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination.” History and Memory 2, no. 1 (1990): 111–29. Klein, Uri. “Conversations with David Perlov.” Kol-no-A [in Hebrew] 19 (1981): 17001E29. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London: Sphere Books, 1989. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001. Michelson, Annette, ed. Kino Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Translated by Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984. Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. Ne’eman, Judd. “The Tragic Sense of Zionism: Shadow Cinema and the Holocaust.” Shofar 24, no. 1 (2005): 22–36. Rancière, Jacques. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London: Verso, 2007. Rodowick, David Norman. “Time and Memory, Orders and Powers.” In Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine, 79–119. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Sutton, Damian. Photography, Cinema, Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Virilio, Paul. The Lost Dimension. Translated by Daniel Moshenberg. New York: Semiotext(e), 1991. Wigoder, Meir. “Diary and the Everyday.” Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew] 18 (2001): 139–53. Zimmerman, Moshe. Don’t Touch My Holocaust: The Influence of the Holocaust on Israeli Cinema and Society [in Hebrew]. Haifa: University of Haifa Press and Zmora-Bitan, 2002.

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The Agonies of an Eternal Victim: Zionist Guilt in Avi Mograbi’s Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi Shmulik Duvdevani

About ten years ago [. . .] I bought a plot of land. I was a newlywed and I thought that one day maybe my family and I would want to live in a little house of our own [. . .] Because of a clerical mistake at the land registry office, the slice of land listed against my name was larger than what I had bought. Instead of half a dunam [about 500 square meters], say, they wrote down 600 square meters. At first I wasn’t even aware of it, and when I found out some years later I was quite pleased. I thought that the passing years had caused me to forget, and that I had actually bought a larger plot. I didn’t give it much thought [. . .] but then I found out that while our plot was 100 meters bigger, the neighboring plot was 100 meters smaller [. . .] The truth is that it was only then that I realized, and the first thing I thought was that I have to go and see the man and tell him, “Listen, there was a mistake, and I’m building my house on some of your land.” Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi (Avi Mograbi, 1999) opens with a shot of the filmmaker facing the camera and deals with an injustice involving the plot of land he had bought. Mograbi confesses to the “accidental theft” of land from his neighbors-to-be—a mistake for which he was not accountable. The film then moves between three plots, all of them involving Mograbi. One plot follows Mograbi’s interactions with producer Shahar Segal, who commissions Mograbi to make a film for the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s independence and particularly Segal’s indecision regarding the topic of the film. At first he asks Mograbi to make a “happy” film about the jubilee celebrations;

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he then changes his mind and asks that the film deal with the high levels of unemployment in the country, about the “fat cats” as against “those who do not have enough food to eat”; later he tells him to make a film “that will bring about peace” at a time that Netanyahu’s government seemed to be pushing that vision away. The result of Mograbi’s being sent back and forth between the three different subjects is that the film is never actually made. A second storyline deals with Mograbi’s commitment to Efraim—to whom he is selling his plot with the house he is going to build—to hand over the house no later than Independence Day, which clashes with his conscience, which is telling him not to build a house on land that he does not own. A third plot focuses on Mograbi’s work for the Palestinian journalist and television editor Daoud Koutab who hires him to film the remains of the villages from which the Palestinians were expelled in 1948 as part of a film planned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba. Mograbi feels that the emotional burden of making such a documentary will be too great for him, but he hesitates to turn Koutab down. The film ends with the shot of a dead, young Palestinian man, his body left lying on the ground, his head split open. This image concludes a series of violent images from the Nakba Day, May 15, 1998, that include Israeli soldiers shooting at stone-throwing Palestinian youngsters. The victim, one can assume, is one of those young Palestinians. The space between these two situations—the confession of the injustice and the dead Palestinian—is filled with themes that are particular to personal documentary films (for which I coined the term “I-movies”) in Israel: guilt, accountability, victimhood, repentance, and compensation.1 I suggest that my reading of Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi can stand as a model for the examination of Israeli “I-movies” that were produced in the 1990s and the early 2000s. I propose reading these films as confessional and as expressing their makers’ acknowledgment of their accountability for the constitutive and formative events related to the establishment of the State of Israel and the accompanying Palestinian Nakba—even though they did not actually participate in them. This accountability originates in the understanding that my present state would not be as it is today were it not for past Zionist activities—of expulsion, banishment, and massacre—that have not yet been atoned and compensated for. My discussion below should not only been seen in the framework of the relations between the private and the public spheres. Rather, given the age of these “I-movie” documentarists, and the identity of their parents as having belonged to the generation that founded the state and fought in the War of

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Independence, it also lies within the framework of intergenerational relations. The sons’ recognition that their existence in the present is the direct result of injustices in the past leads them to take on their parents’ guilt so as to cleanse them. This reading draws on a model described by Roland Barthes, whereby the son who discovers his father’s guilt cleanses the father by transferring his guilt onto himself. He does this by carrying out a similar atrocity. This is the only way he can survive in the unjust world created for him by his father. The definition of the son’s identity by the father, who perpetrated the injustice, means that the son also bears his guilt. Indeed, the father controls the Zionist space in which the son now finds himself—the State of Israel. Furthermore, the son can never detach himself from his identity, from the notion that his existence and very essence are the outcome of his father’s actions in the past. The son’s actions in the present only strengthen the assertion of guilt. Their objective is not to bring about a fundamental shift in the son’s relation with his father, the perpetrator of the injustice, but rather to try and atone for the feeling of guilt. These actions are an expression of accountability on the part of an individual who see him/herself as part of the injustice, as opposed to those who deny it, are unaware of it, or ignore it. If I cannot turn back history or fix the injustice, if I am unable to return the loss and thus placate the feelings of guilt, then the least I can do is to take accountability and offer compensation (e.g. by volunteering to pro-Palestinian aid organizations), which is only a replacement to the extent that acknowledgment itself might satisfy the victim. The creators of Israeli “I-movies” do not ignore the question of accountability; they do not deny that they are part of a certain historical dynasty. The fact that they made their films shows that they chose not to realize that possibility. This is a political choice and not an automatic development inasmuch as they acknowledge the guilt that is etched on them (and in this they are different from those who refuse to acknowledge their guilt or are even unaware of it). Israeli “I-movies”—for which I take Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi to be a model—should be seen as a confession, through which their creators express their guilt for being party to the injustice perpetrated by their Zionist fathers. Yet we should distinguish between the intimate confession of the church confessional or the psychologist’s couch on the one hand, and the public confession produced by personal documentary films on the other. With the former, there is a clear distinction between the guilty penitent and the confessor; public confession, as I

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will show, seeks to include the viewers within the circle of guilt—to force them to identify within themselves the guilt about which the penitent is talking. Similarly to the creators of other Israeli “I-movies” during the period under discussion—such as Amit Goren, Michal Aviad, Yuli Cohen Gerstel, and Danae Elon—the guilt expressed by Mograbi in his film is thus not personal but rather related to Zionism, to the Nakba, to the Zionist father who carried out the injustice. It derives from the fact that Zionism is part of the creators’ own definition of their subjectivity. It is guilt that originates in Zionist history, to which the viewers are also party. My choice of Mograbi’s film also derives from the interest aroused by this unique Israeli filmmaker, whose films stretch the already elastic limits of contemporary documentary cinema (Mograbi himself describes his films as fictional documentaries).2 Mograbi is the lead actor in his films, where the word “actor” is used intentionally. “Mograbi” in the films is not entirely, if at all, Mograbi who is actually making the documentary (in the film August [2002] Mograbi plays a number of roles, based on small changes in facial expressions and additions to his clothing). Mograbi’s factual–fictional character becomes an allegory that brings the affinity between the personal and the political into relief, as well as the relationship between historical reality and personal accountability.

The character’s double status The injustice reported by “Mograbi” in Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi is the result of a mistake by “some clerk or other.” “Mograbi” tries to right this wrong but at the same time he himself becomes a victim—he is pursued by the person to whom he sold the house that is to be built on the plot, and is distressed by his failure to complete any of the films he committed to making in time for Israel’s jubilee celebrations. This is how “Mograbi” eludes guilt—and thus accountability as well. This, I would argue, is why the film ends as it starts—with “Mograbi” sitting helplessly and passively in front of the camera. This passive sitting expresses the situation of one who refuses to acknowledge his accountability, who prefers not to forgo the position of the victim, which is always a passive one—the victim is not accountable and is incapable of change. Meanwhile, taking accountability instigates a change in consciousness regarding how we conceive of our existence.

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It is the outlook of someone who has chosen to manage his life and not to be managed by it. I intend to demonstrate the film’s complexity, which first and foremost derives from the fact that it is driven by three entirely imaginary plots which were invented by the director for the film. However, this is extra-textual knowledge, and even if the viewer is unaware of it this does not change the status of the text, in which “Mograbi” is a character located on the border line between fact and fiction. I would like to suggest that we should distinguish between Mograbi, the director of the film, who has a factual and historical presence and whose voice organizes the entire work, and “Mograbi,” the made up character, who, while, played by the director, does not actually exist outside the film, and whose “confession” the viewer should reread and afford a new textual standing. The viewers are likely to be aware of the fictitiousness of the text—primarily because the film itself gives it away during the opening credits (see below). They are therefore charged with the task of grasping the intent behind the deployment of documentary codes and conventions, and should watch the film as if it were a documentary while knowing that the text is fictional. This play between factual and fictional readings has the potential for reflexivity: it does not enable the viewers to classify either the film or Mograbi’s slippery status, and encourages them to turn that ambivalence into the basis for interpreting the film. If the film’s objective were to parody the documentary genre or to offer a cultural critique—for instance, to criticize the documentary’s claim to “truth” and the elasticity of documentary truth—all it would have required is a sophisticated viewer, who is familiar with the codes and conventions of documentary cinema, and who can identify the film’s parodic agenda and enjoy the joke. However, this notion would not posit the film’s double status, which requires the viewer to enact two codes of reading/viewing/interpreting the film. While on the one hand Mograbi strives to deploy rhetorical means of persuasion in order to position the text as a documentary, on the other hand he adopts strategies that destabilize the film’s status as a documentary: for instance, the opening credits list the names of the “actors” (Daoud Koutab and Shahar Segal, but not Mograbi himself) who appear in “a film by Avi Mograbi,” a convention associated with fiction films. This element by itself is enough to arouse the viewer’s suspicions. There is a gap between the viewer and “Mograbi” that requires the former to take a stand, to choose a strategy for reading the film. This gap derives from the fact that the documentarist’s confession is conveyed by a fictional character. Even if the act of choice concludes in an inability to choose, it gives the viewer

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certain accountability. The fact that “Mograbi” faces the camera/viewer in an act of confession and his (unflattering) visual and verbal self-exposure create credibility—the first problem of every confession and every autobiography. As argued by Gilmore, “[i]n order to stand as an authoritative producer of ‘truth’, one must successfully position oneself as a confessing subject whose account adequately fulfills enough of the requirements of confession.”3 “Mograbi” needs the viewer in order to make his confession. Without the presence of an audient (even it is only suggested at), the confession lacks validity. It is the audient who makes the talk into an act of confession and not only an internal meditation. Should the viewer choose to treat the confession by “Mograbi” as the “truth”—based on the authoritative status of the confession as producing truth—then the viewer will position herself or himself as having the function of a judge, observing the story from the “outside.” On the basis of this reading, “Mograbi” is a pleasant and moral man who has fallen victim to contradictory demands and who is deserving of our compassion (which, according to Aristotle, is the “sadness caused by the ills of others which it believes come undeservedly”). “Mograbi’s” intentions regarding the plot of land that was “secreted in his favor” and the house that he is building on it would appear to be good—he seeks to right the wrong. The viewer is meant to identify with his distress, which is the result of others’ nonresponsiveness to his good heartedness, and to feel compassion regarding the anguish in which “Mograbi” finds himself. However, should the viewer choose to see the confession as fictional—first and foremost because it appears within a fictional framework (the credits), but also because of the viewer’s external knowledge, which Mograbi supplied in press interviews in the run up to the film’s release—the viewer can no longer remain a bystander. The fictitiousness invites the deciphering or interpreting of the film. This viewer is not the addressee of the confession (whose accountability derives from his constructing/enabling it, and even directing it, in many senses). Rather, the viewer is called upon to “read” the text and take interpretive accountability, which in turn exposes him/her, the interpreter, and may even incriminate him/ her. If the confession is fictional, and if the viewer is therefore not “external” to it (in the sense of taking part in the process of producing guilt, though without being party to it), he/she is also required to take part as an “interpreter” of the “confession,” to read it actively. In other words, the viewer must take a stand, which transposes him/her from the position of “bystander” to that of “participant.” Moreover, if the confession is fictional from the outset, then it is not a confession at all. This fact requires the viewer to “decipher” the text. The confession is no

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longer private; it now has a public meaning that “incorporates” the viewer. The viewer must provide an interpretation: after all, beneath the fictional confession one might try and trace real guilt. I argue that the film expresses such guilt, but it hides behind a fictional story. It is up to the viewer to clarify what the nature of this guilt is. In other words, the viewer must ask him/herself what the guilt that drives the sham confession really is, and what the objective of the confession is. The fact that “Mograbi” chooses to confess to the viewer testifies to the existence of guilt, regardless of the veracity of the story in which it is conveyed, namely, the confession. The fictitiousness of the confession precisely indicates that the speaker is entirely aware of the nature of his guilt. The speaker is the filmmaker; there is an organizing voice behind the film that is responsible for its images and sounds and the way they are chosen and presented so as to make an argument—a statement about the historical world represented in the film. The aesthetic choices, the organization of the film and its argument all testify to a guilt, which the filmmaker cannot be unaware of, that emerges from the very rhetoric of the film. If the penitent’s position is fictitious, then it is Mograbi’s intention that the viewer unpack the story, interpret it. The function of the confession is not to ease the penitent’s guilt, but rather to force the viewer to acknowledge his/her own guilt. In other words, rather than seeing “Mograbi” as confessing in the film (and as noted, the confession is fictitious, at least at the level of narrative), we should see him as a preacher—as trying to move the viewer, and as knowing full well what he is trying to achieve. “Mograbi” wants to share his guilt with the viewer; he is conscious of his guilt, but assumes that the viewer is unaware that he/she too (the viewer) is guilty as well. The strategy of self-incrimination, which lies at the basis of confession and whose aim is to cause the viewer to empathetically identify with “Mograbi,” is actually a way to incriminate the viewer as well. The film’s double status as docu-fiction, which also applies to the character of “Mograbi,” serves Mograbi’s manipulation. He does not take pains to camouflage the fact that the story of the plot is fictitious (in interviews, for instance, or in the credits), and so it would be wrong to define the film as a “mockumentary”— that is, a fictitious film dressed up as a documentary, whose effectiveness lies primarily in its ability to persuade the viewers that, no matter how unrealistic it may seem, what they are watching is “true” and “factual.” Listening to the confession—or more accurately, watching and interpreting it—leaves the viewer with the “imprint” of guilt and is aimed at making him/her understand that he/ she is part of the story, whether he/she likes it or not. Mograbi, the filmmaker

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who is present through the organizing voice, incriminates himself by loading the film with images and sounds that express his guilt. Therefore, in contrast to the dichotomous positions of the penitent and the listener, both he and the viewer are positioned on the same side, that of the guilty.

Accountability Mograbi’s film deals with the avoidance of accountability and the defending of oneself from tormenting guilt. Accountability means critically examining the historical past while recognizing that the existence in the world of any given group cannot be separated from the existence of other groups. This is the understanding, argues Hannah Arendt during her discussion of Jewish history, that the Jews are “one group among other groups, all of which are involved in the business of this world . . . [who do] not simply cease to be coresponsible because [they became] the victim of the world’s injustice and cruelty.”4 Following Arendt, I see accountability (as opposed to “mere” responsibility) as political in nature and as relating to action. Accountability means acknowledging a reality that functions beyond particular national myths. In the context of Jewish history this refers to being set free from the position of the eternal victim, which implies denying “the Jews’ part in the responsibility for the existing conditions.”5 According to Arendt, the Jews’ view of themselves not as “history-makers” but rather as “history-sufferers” has always undermined the possibility of anticipating historical solutions and has actually encouraged a lack of political accountability.6 Accountability, argues Robert Bernasconi, “is primarily backward-looking, focusing on the rectification of past crimes or failings.”7 It is a legal conception that “focuses on what was done” and is separated from the moral conception that focuses on “what the agent was thinking.”8 It requires an action, and its intention is “forward looking.” It manifests itself in the public apology stated by countries and collectives in relation to atrocities they have conducted.9 Apology expresses accountability for wrongdoings caused to another people or minority. Bernasconi refers to the French anthropologist and philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl who distinguishes between legal, social, or objective responsibility and subjective responsibility. The latter is located in conscience, indeterminate, and is not essentially tied to punishment. It is answerable only to conscience.10 It is, therefore, differentiated from legal accountability.

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The Sartrean concept of responsibility is also appropriate in my discussion since it refers not only toward the future, but also to the way I give meaning to the past. In his discussion in Being and Nothingness on freedom and responsibility, Sartre argues that I am responsible to what happens to me and have no excuse, since I chose to act that way or another: “What happens to me happens through me, and I can neither affect myself with it nor revolt against it nor resign myself to it”.11 Sartrean responsibility refers to past events, even those that happened way before I was born, thus “support for affirmative action or for reparations is another way in which people today take responsibility for a course of events that had their origin long ago but whose impact continues to the present.”12 Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi shows that one of the ways for coping with accountability is to turn yourself into a victim—the victim is not accountable, but is rather proof of the existence of injustice and cruelty in the world. The self-conception of “Mograbi” as victim is an Aristotelian means of pathetic persuasion whose objective is to induce the viewer to feel compassion toward him. He attributes his situation to “circumstances” and “history,” to “a mistake” made by “some clerk or other” in the past, which he (“Mograbi”) is now trying to correct, because he is man with a “conscience.” “Mograbi’s” words are thus the opposite of a confession—how can one confess to something one would not appear to be guilty of? So the “guilt” concealed within “Mograbi’s” fictitious confession is not that which he refers to, and which in any case he does not acknowledge. After all, the “crime” was committed (as a result of “a mistake”) by someone else—“a land registry clerk.” What, therefore, is the true guilt behind “Mograbi’s” confession (for even if it is fictitious, its very existence points, as mentioned, to some kind of guilt)? We can answer this by addressing those signs in the film that point to the true guilt that the speaker wishes to unload. My argument is that the ironic gap in the film between Mograbi and “Mograbi,” and the latter’s fictitious confession, are meant to spur the viewer on to a critical reading of the “Mograbi” character and to identify him as a typical outcome of a specific political camp, that of the Liberal-Zionist left. “Mograbi’s” voice is not the only—or even the central—voice in the film; there is another voice present as well, that of the filmmaker, Mograbi, and it is that voice that is responsible for all of the other voices in the film. According to Nichols, the documentary filmmaker’s voice is “the means by which [a] particular point of view or perspective becomes known to us.”13

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The organization of all of the voices in the film is subjugated to the filmmaker’s perspective; he uses them so as to create his argument about the historical world. The filmmaker’s voice also includes the artistic decisions—the editing, the composition of the shots, the voiceovers, the organization of the details according to this or that chronological order, the use of archival material and the mode of representation.14 As against the unconscious feelings of guilt expressed by “Mograbi”—whose voice is but one of many in the film—Mograbi proffers another voice—his own—which is given expression through the artistic decisions that reveal the true guilt. Mograbi uses these artistic decisions to expose the guilt that nags at “Mograbi’s” conscience. This guilt appears through images of signs of the abandonment of Palestinian towns and villages that are edited into the film. These images create the guilt that he refuses to deal with. And while this creates an ironic gap between Mograbi and “Mograbi,” which is a consequence of the work’s double status (as docu-fiction), Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi does not entirely lack ownership being taken of “the voice of guilt.” How does one know that there is this “extra voice” (that is, the “voice” of Mograbi the filmmaker that “takes ownership” of the guilt)? First, through the way in which images of Israeli jubilee events are “disturbed” by images of Arab villages that were abandoned in 1948, or by the voice of Koutab himself as he recites their names. The images and words thus become the traces of Palestinian memory impressed on the earth, images and names that represent guilt for the Palestinian Nakba, which has been intentionally blurred by Zionism. But the traces of the injustice, and the guilt it entails, nonetheless break through. The first ceremony filmed in Mograbi’s movie that represents the hegemonic Zionist narrative, or that collective memory that emphasizes and appropriates the standpoint of the victim, is the lighting of Chanukah candles at the residence of President Ezer Weizman. The theme of the ceremony is the integration of Jewish immigrants from around the world. A festive dinner in honor of the jubilee year, hosted at a hotel in Jerusalem, is also dedicated to immigration to Israel and includes a range of ethnic foods. The dinner represents “fifty years of gastronomic development,” and Zionist history is examined through the history of food.15 The first “disturbance” takes place during the festive dinner. The image disappears (in an effect that recalls disturbances in a broadcast) and is replaced by Daoud Koutab’s voice, who is commissioning “Mograbi” to make the above-mentioned film about the Nakba. “Mograbi” then goes on to document his trip to Ramallah for his meeting with Koutab. The following images alternate

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between the Zionist narrative and signs of the Nakba—as part of an activity to mark 50 years of the State of Israel, members of Israeli youth movements are seen trying to solve a riddle about the Seven Species, while “Mograbi’s” camera, operating “in the service of ” Koutab, portrays the ruins of the Arab village, Miska (northeast of Kalkilia), which was destroyed and an orchard planted in its place. The camera lingers on the ruins of an Arab house, and the next image moves to the Jewish town where “Mograbi’s” new house is being built; a tree-planting ceremony for the Jewish festival of Tu Bishvat, where Prime Minister Netanyahu is seen planting a sapling, is interrupted by images of an Arab settlement while the soundtrack makes noises of “disturbance” like a radio that is not properly tuned in; a rally to mark 30 years since the capturing of Hebron is “disturbed” by images of an abandoned Arab house; a Prime Ministerial speech to distinguished Arab guests at the president’s residence is “disrupted” by Koutab’s voice, saying: “the village of Zakariya in the district of Hebron . . .” and so on.16 In this way, the “voice” of Mograbi the filmmaker makes the Nakba present. These Palestinian “disturbances” both arouse guilt, which is eradicated by what Raz-Krakotzkin terms “a mechanism of removal and denial,” and threaten the standpoint of the victim, which has gradually become a central component of the Zionist ideological apparatus. They represent that which Zionism has repeatedly repressed—the fact that Zionism itself created victims. The mentality of “negating the Diaspora,” which for many decades denied the Jewish Diasporic past and nurtured the idea of the “melting pot,” continues to deny the exile forced on Palestinians by the Zionists in 1948. Raz-Krakotzkin argues that “the view of history that derives from the mentality of ‘negating the Diaspora’ is the denial or refutation of the Palestinian tragedy that accompanied the foundation of the State of Israel.”17 Ignoring the Palestinian narrative and Palestinian collective memory by the institutionalized Zionist historiography is, he argues, one of the more significant characteristics of Zionist culture. In addition to these “broadcast interferences,” which represent the Palestinian Nakba and Zionism’s repressed guilt for it, and which serve to “return to the present that past whose denial is part of the present,”18 Mograbi makes use of another cinematic strategy, namely, reverse movement. The Green House (a former Palestinian mansion that now serves as a prestigious functions hall) in Sheikh Mounis is the first site where the movement of people into and around the building is filmed backward, with Koutab talking in voice-over about the (Palestinian) history of the place. When Koutab discusses the metamorphoses undergone by the place in Tel Aviv currently occupied by the Dizengoff Shopping

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Center (formerly the Jewish neighborhood of Nordia, which was built on land owned by Hinnawi, who fled to Egypt in 1948), the people and cars passing the shopping center are filmed in reverse. Finally, at a conference of IDF veterans— held at the Etzel Museum (“Gidi House”) at Manshieh, near Jaffa, which was conquered by Etzel members in 1948—the arrival of the delegates is shown in reverse movement. In the voice-over, Koutab points out (among other things) that the Etzel organization was responsible for the massacre at Deir Yassin. While the reverse movement disrupts the linear narrative movement of progress identified with Zionism, or with what Walter Benjamin calls “the history of the victors,” it primarily expresses the idea of returning to the past, to the source, to the roots of the place; the idea of exposing earlier geological strata that have been concealed by the irreversible progression of history.19 Mograbi wishes to “reverse” the continuity that erases the past. But the past is not “silenced”: the Green House—one of the only remaining houses from the Arab village Sheikh Mounis—the Etzel Museum—built on the ruins of an Arab house—and the other “signs of abandonment” described above all represent “the language of a voice since reduced to silence,” as Foucault puts it.20 Koutab’s voice-over, as the spokesman of Palestinian history, constructs Palestinian collective memory (not the “living” autobiographical memory of someone who experienced the events of 1948 himself)—the exile, the uprooting and the “return,” that “element of Palestinian identity” that has become “the main factor uniting Israeli Arabs and separating them from other Arab peoples.”21 The extent of the compassion that “Mograbi” demands of the viewer is tinged with self-righteousness in that, according to his own story, he was aware of the mistake but “repressed” it. Now he is struggling to deal with its consequences. In other words, the compassion that “Mograbi” asks of the viewers emphasizes that he was the victim of a mistake, and causes us to forget the fact that the owner of the adjacent plot is actually the real victim. “Mograbi” makes sure to nurture the image of someone who has fallen victim to a mistake made by “someone else,” thereby positioning himself on the same level as the real victims and ignoring the question of accountability.

The discourse of victimhood The “discourse of victimhood” that emerges from the self-righteous remarks by “Mograbi” and the way he turns himself into a victim of circumstance are his way

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of dealing with questions of guilt and accountability. The act of interpretation that derives from reading the film as a fictitious text positions “Mograbi” as someone who is incapable of throwing off the prevalent discourse in Jewish experience and identity. According to Shohat, this discourse highlights the suffering of the Jews and their persecution by their bitter enemies throughout history. The rhetoric of the Zionist discourse of victimhood has a particularly defensive message—the new Jew will fight ferociously for his land against Arab aggressors. This ethos, which remains dominant today, asserts that the Jewish people does not desire war, but rather seeks to establish relations with their Arab neighbors that are based on understanding and mutual recognition. The notion that Zionism itself instigates injustices against other victims, says Shohat, “leads to violent opposition, or, in the case of liberals, to epistemological vertigo.”22 In other words, “Mograbi” represents someone who is unable to detach himself from the narrative of the victim, even if history “proves” otherwise. The representation of the national narrative of victimhood through the particular character of “Mograbi” is highlighted in the film when it (incorrectly) points out that the fiftieth anniversary of Israel’s independence falls on exactly the same day that “Mograbi” is to celebrate his forty-second birthday. This fictional linkage between the individual and the national enables a reading of “Mograbi’s” story not only as a report about one man’s distress—a baseless distress given that the entire story is made up—but rather as an expression of the Zionist-Israeli collective discourse. Furthermore, the gap between the discourse of victimhood that emerges from “Mograbi’s” confession and the voice of guilt that arises from the images, their organization, and the relationship between the soundtrack and pictures in the film indicates the nature of the collective discourse. The images that refer to the Palestinian Nakba (houses in ruins, cactus bushes covering what were once Palestinian settlements) identify Zionism as the “creator of exiled communities,” as Shohat puts it, and give expression to the threat to the Jewish-Zionist discourse that, as mentioned, stresses the “aspect of victimhood” in Jewish experience and identity. On the basis of a reading of the text as fictitious, “Mograbi” is the Zionist son who is unable to deal with the fact that his father perpetrated that injustice. Therefore, he refuses to point to the source of the injustice (“a mistake by some clerk or other”), and prefers to position himself as yet another victim of circumstance. In the film, his unconscious feelings of guilt take on an accusatory

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tone, directed toward Efraim, the man who has bought the house that “Mograbi” is meant to build on his plot of land. The representation of Efraim—who insists that “Mograbi” meet the terms of the contract they signed, and demands to receive the house by Independence Day—as the “bad guy,” as the source of all of hardships that befall “Mograbi,” offers “Mograbi” (the imaginary character) another way of positioning himself as a victim. After all, the mistake was made by someone else, and “Mograbi” is only made aware of it later. Although he is made party to it by virtue of knowing about it, he chooses to forget (“I didn’t pay it any attention”). This enables him to preserve the image of the “unfortunate victim,” which he makes sure to nurture throughout the film. Shifting the guilt on to “someone else” also expresses his evasion of accountability. This is also the reason that the “deprived” couple (whose plot is reduced to 400 square meters) are portrayed only as shadows on the wall in the scene in which they burst violently into “Mograbi’s” house late one night. The choice of the visual representation of shadows, and not actual presence, is related to the Jungian archetype of the shadow, which stands for those repressed impulses whose existence is hard to accept. The shadow is also related to the formation of identity and represents characteristics that the individual sees as negative and as foreign to him. The violent outburst attributed to the other seeks to define “Mograbi” as nonviolent; it represents the part of “Mograbi” that is “not I,” that is, his inability to identify violent impulses within himself. Thus, the real victims in the story are denied full presence and a face so that they won’t contrast “Mograbi” as the one who embraces a victim identity. This portrayal stresses the distress and victimhood experienced by “Mograbi.” Violence is not part of his identity; rather, it is associated with the “other.” The fact that Mograbi’s “voice” is also present in the film—Mograbi the “real” documentarist—gives rise to a critical perspective on the imaginary character of “Mograbi.” The story of “Mograbi” is a kind of pedagogical morality play in which Mograbi observes his educated viewers—by staring directly at the camera—as they watch the “play” that he has put on for them. The fictional confession is actually Mograbi’s way, via “Mograbi,” to direct his gaze at the viewers and demand that they learn the lesson of the “play.” The purpose of the filmmaker’s staring at the viewers, through the fictitious character that is an image of him, is to embroil them within the guilt.

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The father, the son, and the feeling of guilt In his work, Sur Racine, which he published in 1960, the literary critic and semiotician Roland Barthes presents a structural and psychoanalytic analysis of the tragedies penned by the seventeenth-century French playwright, Jacques Racine. From the structural perspective he views the tragedy as a kind of system of units and functions, while from the psychoanalytic perspective he puts forward a discussion of father–son relations that refers to the father’s power and the son’s fear of him. According to Barthes’ portrayal of the Racinian framework, even when the son discovers that his father is evil he desires to remain his son. According to Barthes, this conflict has only one solution: the child takes the father’s guilt onto himself by committing a crime that is a sort of repetition of his father’s crimes. The God-father is thus absolved of guilt, and the son’s tribulations are seen as justified. By way of generalization, Barthes maintains that every tragic hero is born innocent, but that he becomes guilty in order to redeem the God-father from sin. Racinian theology thus represents redemption in reverse: man does not atone for his sins, but rather for God’s. The protagonist’s guilt has an essential function: if man is pure, then God—who has sinned against him—is impure, and the world (which rests on the belief in God’s absolute justness) falls apart. Man therefore takes accountability for that which is outside him and precedes him—God, blood, the Father, and the Law. He takes the father’s sins upon himself in order to redeem the world and prevent it from falling apart. The son takes the God-father’s guilt upon himself because he is afraid of opening his eyes and acknowledging that his father is guilty of sin. The Racinian hero desires to free himself from his loyalty to the past, to the father, but is trapped in the dilemma what it is that he should do, without being able to act: “he appeals to, he invokes, an action, he does not perform it; he proposes alternatives but does not decide between them; he is compelled to act but does not project himself into action; he knows dilemmas, not problems; he is a reject more than a project.”23 This situation can be seen in the “I-movies” that were made following the First Intifada, and especially following the Al-Aqsa Intifada (the Second Intifada). Though the specific film under discussion was made after the end of the First Intifada and before the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out—it nevertheless reflects upon

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the inability to correct the historical injustice inflicted upon the Palestinians due to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995. According to that reading, Rabin, aware of his being the “perpetrating father” (as one of the commanding officers of the Palmach, the precursor of the Israel Defense Forces), apparently was seeking to “amend” himself, his generation, and in fact Zionism from its guilt.24 Therefore, the Oslo accords signed between Israel and the Palestinians had a “corrective function”—an atonement of guilt. Thus, the “purification” of the symbolic father would have exempted the sons from their tragic fate of continuing and carrying the father’s guilt. From this point of view, the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin led to the “cancelation of the atonement,” thus leaving the sons in their tragic loop. Thus, Mograbi’s film critically reflects upon this complex position that the “Zionist son” is situated in—the inability to denounce the father while at the same time being aware that his position in the present is a direct result of the injustices inflicted by the father. In Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi, “Mograbi” represents the (Racinian) tragic hero who is unable to act because he is unable to decide. The situation in which he finds himself is the outcome of his desire to liberate himself from his loyalty to the father, but because this liberation means murdering the father he is not capable of going through with it. Identifying the Palestinian Nakba with its perpetrators, the generation of 1948, and acknowledging the injustice done to the Palestinians in that year, means recognizing the crime committed by the father. For Roland Barthes, this acknowledgment leads to a paradoxical moment: the son discovers that his father is evil, but nonetheless desires to remain his son. As a result, the son feels trapped in a suffocating relationship with his father. I wish to argue that the popular Palestinian uprising that began on December 8–9, 1987 (the First Intifada) brought the injustice perpetrated against the Palestinians by the generation of 1948 more forcefully to the surface of consciousness for two main reasons: The first reason is that of all Israel’s wars, the Intifada was the first time that Israelis fought the Palestinian people without the very existence of the Zionist-Jewish national home being at stake. The second reason is that in many ways, the Palestinian people’s struggle parallels the Jewish effort to establish the State of Israel and returns to consciousness the events of the war of 1948. The expulsion of Palestinians and the destruction of their homes that accompanied the Israeli effort against the Intifada identified their perpetrators—the sons— with the fathers and the injustices carried out by the generation of 1948.

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The violent repression of the Intifada was akin to the son repeating his father’s crimes. Recognizing the elements of aggression and injustice in Zionism— elements that have been repressed in order to nurture the image of the victim who has no choice but to resort to force—leads to a paradox, whereby the father, thanks to whom the son is able to live as sovereign in his country, is also perceived as a perpetrator. The son sees the father as a perpetrator and sees himself as partner to the atrocity, both because his life is the product of the atrocity, the outcome of the father’s crime, and because, via the occupation, and especially the suppression of the Intifada, he himself is committing the same crime by repeating and continuing the father’s actions. Their shared fate and the reproduction of the father’s crimes mean that the son is the same as the father in terms of his guilt vis-à-vis the Palestinians and deny him the right to murder the criminal father (and, of course, release him from the awful need to do so). They also liberate the father from his crimes vis-à-vis the son (staining him with the Nakba), as the son is now a criminal deserving punishment. According to this reading, the generation of 1948 is the father (who fought in the War of Independence), awarding his son life in the form of the state he founded. It represents an impossible dual position (an “impotent dialectic,” as Barthes puts it) whereby it is the origin of life: the generation of 1948 is the father who gives the subject his/her existence, identity, and desire (“thanks to him, I live here as sovereign in this country”), and so the son is hugely in his debt; but the Zionist father is also responsible for the tragic situation in which the son is caught up, and he is the reason for the guilt that the son is taking upon himself. By the end of the film, “Mograbi” is in the midst of an irresolvable crisis, and the end sees him sitting helplessly in front of the camera again, just as in the opening of the film. The circular narrative reflects the feelings of someone who is incapable of acting outside the conceptual framework of the victim. The clerk who made the “mistake” becomes an anonymous figure who made a bureaucratic error—all so that the perpetrator of the injustice is not actually named. However, the double reading recreates the critical dimension intended by Mograbi, the filmmaker: while he (as “Mograbi”) nonetheless incriminates himself, because he cannot extract himself from the narrative of guilt, he simultaneously observes from a certain distance those whose inability to do so turns them into victims. The linkage between the son, the father who perpetrated the injustice, and guilt arises in the monologue that “Mograbi” delivers at the end of the film as the “Jubilee Bells” ring in the background—the festive performance broadcast on the television set behind him to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Israeli

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independence. He talks about the great similarity (in terms of facial features and voice) between himself and his own father. The first time he noticed the similarity, says “Mograbi,” he felt deeply uncomfortable. He says that it was not because he felt that he was aging, but because there was something troublesome about it. A short biographical note is required here: Mograbi’s father was a member of the Etzel organization. When he was 17 he was caught by the British and expelled to Eritrea with other Etzel members. The ideological schism between father and son deepened during Avi’s stint in jail during the Lebanon War for conscientious objection, and was part of their relationship until the father died in 1983. The linkage formed via physical signs between father and son in this scene— the hairs on his back and shoulders remind “Mograbi” of his father—is inherent to the film, which deals with the relationship between the Palestinian Nakba and the Zionist son, who takes accountability for the father’s crimes. The signs “Mograbi” discovers on his body make him similar to his father, which he finds “troublesome.” He recognizes that his identity is a function of his family tree, that his father defines his identity, and that his father’s guilt is thus an integral part of him. The son looks in the mirror and sees his father; he sees in himself the memory of the guilt, the past that is present in and enslaves the present. He cannot forget his father and detach himself from him because that would leave him without an identity. He therefore remains chained to the guilt that is part of his identity. The characteristic passiveness of “Mograbi” in the film’s closing scene reflects the condition of the son, who is unable to detach himself from the father. “Mograbi,” the Zionist son, is aware that his present (the house he has sold to Efraim, and the rise in value of the plot he bought) is the result of an injustice perpetrated in the past that has not yet been atoned and compensated for. However, instead of taking accountability for the injustice, he prefers to position himself as a victim of circumstance. Accountability (which he avoids) must be practically and politically realized—by taking part in social struggles, by providing compensation, or through diplomatic or military activity. According to Ophir, “the total loss is thus reinstated into different circles of exchange so as to demand the redemption of an endless debt.”25 Accountability demands practices of remembering, in contrast to the practices of forgetting that characterize those who have no desire to acknowledge their accountability. The inability to forego the position of the victim—that is, to create remembrance (as Walter Benjamin calls it)—characterizes Israeli society

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of the 1980s and 1990s, when “the hegemonic culture and ideological discourse do not cease to exploit the position of the victim as a strategy in both internal and external power struggles. They also—or mainly—insist on adhering to the position of the victim in those many and recurring situations in which Israeli Jews are perpetrating injustices that make others the victims of irremediable loss.”26 The identification that “Mograbi” hopes his confession will instill in the viewer demands accountability on part of the viewer. The viewer’s decision to identify “Mograbi” as a victim locates “Mograbi” (and the viewer) in a moral position in relation to the world. Should the viewer choose to ignore the possible (or necessary) double reading of the film, then he/she is choosing to ignore the voice that calls attention to the source of the guilt and to reconcile him/herself with “Mograbi’s” victimhood. This viewer would be ignoring the film’s critical attitude to “Mograbi” and the Zionist standpoint of victimhood that he adopts. He/she is incriminated by their empathy for “Mograbi.” The viewer, though, is asked to “merge” with the gaze and voice of Mograbi, the filmmaker. The viewer is asked to identify the gaps in the text, primarily the gap between the “fictitious” and “factual” readings, which is also the gap between the self-perception of “Mograbi” as victim and Mograbi’s own critical position. The text’s double viewpoint produces a reading that allows one to reject its acceptance as nothing more than information, as well as to turn “Mograbi” from a private character into a representative of collective guilt. In other words, from the moment that the film’s status as a documentary is undermined, the viewer must reread, or reorganize the text and recognize its criticism of the Zionist discourse of victimhood. The destabilizing of the film’s documentary status derives from the gap between what the text “broadcasts,” between the use of aesthetic conventions that are widely deployed in documentary cinema and familiar to the viewer, and the identification of an additional voice in the film—that of Mograbi (and not “Mograbi”).

Conclusion Mograbi places both the viewer and himself in the same position regarding moral accountability. His film thus addresses every Zionist and Israeli, but mainly those viewers who are prepared to face up to the question of their guilt. Both the viewers and the filmmaker must examine themselves, and in this sense,

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at least, Mograbi does not hold himself up as judge and accuser, but rather places himself on trial. The film demands of its audience that it explore the past and take accountability—that is, to direct its actions and thoughts to the future, to correcting the injustices of the past. “Mograbi’s” fictitious confession is aimed at forcing others, the viewers, to confess as well. In this sense, it is fundamentally aggressive. As viewers, we are prepared to judge others (namely, “Mograbi”), but we have no interest in subjecting ourselves to a similar close examination. By making his aggressive demand, is Mograbi setting himself up as a better person than the viewers, who are unwilling or unable to confess their guilt? I would argue that the film is actually critical of those who are willing to confess, of those who hold onto the status of victimhood and believe that the public acknowledgment of their guilt makes them morally superior to people who refuse to confess. Furthermore, their confession portrays them as morally tormented. In his essay, “The Identity of Absence,” Mahmoud Darwish denounces the left-wing, liberal Israeli who is occupying the Palestinian homeland. He confesses to his Palestinian victim in order to cleanse his conscience, saying to him, “We are similar; I am your tormented brother.” In this way he “preserves the identity card of the crybaby.” The tormented penitents thus address the Palestinian victim and appropriate him in order to cope with the tribulations of their guilt. My guilt as a Zionist precedes me. I am “born” into it by virtue of the fact that I was born in this country as part of a certain history. It continues after I am gone. It has no end, and nor will it—not until the victim is compensated. According to Naomi Roth-Arriaza, for the victim reparations are remuneration for a loss and for the perpetrator they clean his name.27 They can be awarded administratively by the government—to victims and survivors of massive violations of human rights (which is how Germany paid compensation to the victims of the Holocaust). Compensation is the outcome of accepting accountability, which I bear by virtue of who I am, and not because of my active participation in causing the injustice, which would narrow accountability down to a small number of individuals and, ultimately, make the collective innocent. Reparations are thus an expression of the guilt of the state and its citizens, whoever they are. Mograbi’s film closes with violent images from Nakba Day. The transition to those pictures follows familiar images of Israelis celebrating and spraying one another with foam, a common Israeli Independence Day practice. It is not only

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the linkage between (Israeli) independence and the (Palestinian) Nakba that is significant here, but also the images of the foam spraying, which are replaced by the violence used by IDF soldiers on Palestinians who insisted on standing to attention in order to mark their grief on that day. Mograbi appears to use this linkage to comment on the connection between the establishment of the State of Israel and the oppression of others and the catastrophe that befell them.

Notes 1 In my book, First Person, Camera, I discuss the idiosyncratic themes of Israeli “I-movies” made during the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. I show how the self-absorbed confessor of the “I-Movie” positions him/herself in the present within the context of the communal, national, past, for which he/she takes responsibility and to which he/she reacts with a sense of guilt. Through close analysis of several films, I expose the filmmaker’s expression of accountability for constitutive events shaping the community even though never participating in them—an accountability stemming from the intimate sense of society, to which he/she is committed nonetheless. See: First Person, Camera (Keter Publishing, 2010 [Hebrew]). For further discussion on personal documentaries see Jim Lane, The Autobiographical Documentary in America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Roger Odin, “From Home Movies to TV Home Productions and I Home Productions: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach,” Kolnoa—Assaph D 1 (1998): 193–204; Michael Renov, “New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in the Post-Verité Age,” in Feminism and Documentary, ed. Diane Waldman and Janet Walker (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 84–94. 2 Mograbi’s filmography includes Deportation (1989), How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997), August (2002), Avenge But One of My Two Eyes (2005) and Z32 (2008). 3 Leigh Gilmore, “Placing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical Authority,” in Autobiography and Postmodernism, ed. Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore & Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 55. 4 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 6. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 96. 6 Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992), 207.

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7 Robert Bernasconi, “Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility,” in Difficulties of Ethical Life, ed. Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 131–2. 8 Bernasconi, “Before Whom and for What?” 132. 9 Thus, the University of Alabama offered an apology for slavery; the US government apologized to Japanese-Americans for their internment during WW2; and the Afrikaners in South Africa apologized for the crimes of the Apartheid. For further discussion see Charles L. Griswold, Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 146–63. 10 Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, L’idée de responsabilité (Paris: Hachette, 1884), 27. 11 Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1969), 554. 12 Bernasconi, “Before Whom and for What?” 141. 13 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 43. 14 On the six modes—that is, “basic ways of organizing texts in relation to certain recurrent features or conventions”—see Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 32–75. 15 It is already possible to see here how the mechanism of repression and homogenization serves the Zionist center, as the waiters, who are asked to dress up as pioneers, are actually Palestinian. 16 The residents of this village were expelled on June 9, 1950 on the orders of Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 250–1. 17 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile in the Midst of Sovereignty: A Critique of ‘Shlilat HaGalut’ in Israeli Culture,” Part I, Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew] 4 (1993): 47. 18 Raz-Krakotzkin., “Exile in the Midst of Sovereignty,” 49. 19 According to Walter Benjamin, by its very nature the history of the oppressed is not continuous, while the dominant historical discourse—that of the victors—is based on the idea of “progress,” on the denial of oppression, and on negating the memory of the oppressed. “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), VII, 256. 20 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1969), 6. 21 Danny Rubinstein, The Fig Tree Embrace—The Palestinian “Right of Return.” [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Keter, 1990), 43–4. The inability by “Mograbi” to deal either with the baggage of Palestinian history that is hidden-repressed beneath the signs

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of abandonment or with his feelings of guilt is expressed through the request or plea by “Mograbi” that Koutab release him from the project he had agreed to work on, while Koutab asks “Mograbi” to film an almost endless list of Arab towns and villages that were destroyed in 1948. Ella Shohat, “Antinomies of Exile: Said at the Frontiers of National Narrations,” in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Cambridge, Mass and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 134. Roland Barthes, On Racine, trans. Richard Howard (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 48–9. Judd Ne’eman, “The Wolf That Devoured Rabin,” Plastica [in Hebrew] 3 (1999): 85. Adi Ophir, Working For the Present: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture [in Hebrew] (Bene Beraq: Hakibbutz Hameuchad/Siman-kriah, 2001), 266. Adi Ophir, Working For the Present, 267. Naomi Roth-Arriaza, “Reparations in the Aftermath of Repression and Mass Violence,” in My Neighbor, My Enemy—Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, ed. Eric Stover et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 122.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. —. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. New York: Grove Press, 1978. Barthes, Roland. On Racine. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 253–64. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. Bernasconi, Robert. “Before Whom and for What? Accountability and the Invention of Ministerial, Hyperbolic, and Infinite Responsibility.” In Difficulties of Ethical Life, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt, 131–46. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Darwish, Mahmoud. “The Identity of Absence.” [In Hebrew and Arabic] Mifgash 7–8 (1987): 46–7. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge, 1969. Gilmore, Leigh. “Placing Truth: Confession, Gender, and Autobiographical Authority.” In Autobiography and Postmodernism, edited by Kathleen Ashley, Leigh Gilmore & Gerald Peters, 54–78. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994.

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Griswold, Charles L. Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Isaac, Jeffrey C. Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992. Lane, Jim. The Autobiographical Documentary in America. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. Lidée de responsabilité. Paris: Hachette, 1884. Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Ne’eman, Judd. “The Wolf that Devoured Rabin.” Plastica [in Hebrew] 3 (1999): 82–7. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001. —. Representing Reality. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Odin, Roger. “From Home Movies to TV Home Productions and I Home Productions: A Semio-Pragmatic Approach.” Kolnoa—Assaph D, 1 (1998): 193001E204. Ophir, Adi. Working For the Present: Essays on Contemporary Israeli Culture [in Hebrew]. Bene Beraq: Hakibbutz Hameuchad/ Siman-kriah, 2001. Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon. “Exile in the Midst of Sovereignty: A Critique of ‘Shlilat HaGalut’ in Israeli Culture.” [in Hebrew] Part I: Theory and Criticism 4 (1993): 23–55. Part II: Theory and Criticism 5 (1994): 113–32. Renov, Michael. “New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in the Post-Verité Age.” In Feminism and Documentary, edited by Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, 84–94. Minneapolis & London University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Roth-Arriaza, Naomi. “Reparations in the Aftermath of Repression and Mass Violence.” In My Neighbor, My Enemy—Justice and Community in the Aftermath of Mass Atrocity, edited by Eric Stover and Harvey M. Weinstein, 121–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rubinstein, Danny. The Fig Tree Embrace—The Palestinian “Right of Return” [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Keter, 1990. Sartre, Jean Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. London: Methuen, 1969. Shohat, Ella. “Antinomies of Exile: Said at the Frontiers of National Narrations.” In Edward Said: A Critical Reader, edited by Michael Sprinker, 121–43. Cambridge, Mass and Oxford: Blackwell, 1992.

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Traces of War: Memory, Trauma, and the Archive in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort Raz Yosef

Modern memory is first of all archival. It relies entirely on the specificity of the trace, the materiality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the image. Pierre Nora1 It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. Jacques Derrida2

The ghosts of war The Israeli documentary film Wasted (Nurit Kedar, 2006), opens with archival footage of Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon visiting the Beaufort fortress on June 6, 1982, after it had been captured by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) during the First Lebanon War. Beaufort, a mountain fortress in southern Lebanon, was established in 1150, during the Crusades. In the context of the First Lebanon War, the fortress had served as a Palestinian military stronghold from which settlements in northern Israel had been shelled. Its capture followed one of the war’s most famous battles, and it came to represent Israeli control in Lebanon. The media accompanied Begin and Sharon to the fortress, where they hastened to report that there had been no fatalities in the battle for Beaufort, even though the word was already out that a Golani commando officer and five other soldiers had fallen in the fighting. The

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Israeli media talked of the fighters’ “supreme heroism” and “utter commitment,” without mentioning the heavy losses suffered by the IDF. The name of the film, Wasted, recalls the Vietnam War, where “to waste” someone meant to kill them. Thus, the film, as Judd Ne’eman notes, creates a linkage between the United States imbroglio and defeat in Vietnam and Israel’s failure as it got stuck in what came to be known as “the Lebanese swamp.”3 In contrast to the Israeli statist media, which emphasized the heroism of the capture of Beaufort, the film reveals and restages repressed and private traumatic memories through the testimonies of 11 soldiers who served there 6 months before the IDF pulled out of Lebanon in May 2000. The soldiers are haunted by the ghosts of the war: they remember the images, the sounds, and the smells of the battlefield; they remember a war in which they never saw the enemy. One of the soldiers asked: “Who are we guarding? What are we guarding? There’s only darkness. We started to get the feeling that we were only guarding ourselves. Why am I here?” Their memories are of horror, paralyzing fear, and of death. At the heart of the film stands the trauma of the destroyed body of the killed or wounded male soldier. Israeli war films of the 1950s and 1960s repressed this traumatic vision. In those films, the warrior who sacrificed his life on the nation’s altar was represented through the myth of the “living-dead,” the soldier, whose physical body is absent, dead, yet nonetheless present and alive in the imagined national consciousness. Through the mythic metaphor of the “living-dead” soldier, the national culture of war confirmed its preparedness to sacrifice victims.4 The existence of the individual was subsumed by the collective, and the death of the warrior was endorsed and justified by being given a greater and more general national and transcendent meaning. Nationalism, like religion, argues Benedict Anderson, “concerns itself with the links between the dead and the yet unborn, the mystery of re-generation . . . It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.”5 Ella Shohat argues that in the context of Israeli war films: “[t]he death of the protagonists . . . is allegorically compensated for by the rebirth of the country—the ultimate protagonist of the film[s].”6 Or, to put it in terms of the body, the real death of the individual, and the materiality of the male body— its skin, flesh, blood, bones—are disavowed and incorporated into the process of the national body’s rebirth. In the film He Walked through the Fields (Yosef Millo, 1967), for example, the death of the soldier, Uri (Asi Dayan), is not shown on screen. The spectacle of his dead body is replaced by a freeze-frame image of Uri’s surprised face seconds before he is killed. The cinematic freeze-frame becomes a metonymic signifier for the threshold between life and death, and

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constructs the national myth of the “living-dead.” The frozen image of Uri’s face dissolves into an image of the sea, from which new immigrants to Israel are arriving. Individual death is suppressed by its incorporation within the national continuity. The sacrifice of Uri’s life while blowing up a bridge assured the safe arrival of Jewish immigrants and paved the way for the establishment of an imagined national Israeli community.7 According to Anderson, the creation of an imagined national community is founded on the simultaneous and shared existence of people who do not know one another personally, and have not met face to face. Therefore, the more blurred the individual identity of the object of memory is, the greater the power of national and collective identity and identification. Individual death is detached from the soldier’s body, and thus can serve as a source of identification for all. Wasted exposes the trauma of the soldier’s dismembered body that was hidden from view by the nationalist war films.8 “You see people being blown up, you see people screaming,” says one of the soldiers. “When I’m treating their wounds, at some point I have to touch the wounds, expose them . . . You’re covered in blood, and then you take out your bandage to bandage him up, you try to open it but it’s slippery from the blood, and you put it in your mouth to rip it, and you’ve got

Figure 6.1 The dancers’ perfect muscular male bodies in Wasted (Kedar, 2006). Courtesy of Nurit Kedar.

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the taste of your friend’s blood in your mouth.” In between the soldiers’ chilling descriptions of the pounded and lacerated male body, Kedar inserts clips of male dancers wearing khaki pants and tight black tank-tops over their well-toned muscles (Figure 6.1). These male bodies crash to the floor, twisting and writhing against the background of phosphorescent lighting—similar to military flares—to simulate the hell of the battlefield. The beautiful, perfect, and whole bodies of the dancers stand in contrast to the horrifying images of the shapeless, pulverized, and helplessly wasted body described in the soldiers’ testimonies.

Traumatic recollections Wasted insists on representing the trauma of the soldier’s mutilated body, although, according to Cathy Caruth, trauma is an unrepresentable experience. Trauma is “a response, sometimes delayed, to an overwhelming event or events, which takes the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations, dreams, thoughts or behaviors stemming from the event.”9 One of the central features of trauma is its belatedness: the trauma victim cannot grasp or represent the traumatic event at the time of its occurrence, and so the traumatic experience continues to haunt the victim over and over. In other words, there is a repetition of the traumatic event, which can only be represented, understood or known after the event itself. Trauma is thus a crisis of knowledge and representation.10 The traumatic event is not repressed, but returns in a deferred action to consciousness. The Freudian concept of “deferred action” (Nachträglichkeit) refers to a figure, an experience, or a secondary scene that comes too late, that reenacts the scene that has already taken place, thereby constructing it as a scene that is emotionally important or meaningful. In other words, trauma is established through a relationship between two events: a first event that is not initially necessarily traumatic, because when it occurs it is still too soon to comprehend its full significance; and a second event that may not be inherently traumatic in itself but that triggers a memory of the earlier event, which is only then filled with traumatic significance. In keeping with this understating of trauma, Wasted does not focus on the catastrophic event itself, but rather on the shocking emotions and experiences as remembered by the soldiers, and on the ways that the interviewees express themselves. For instance, one of the soldiers relates, “Sometimes, when I’d light a cigarette a long time later, that smell would rise up in my nose again . . . [a] smell that’s hard to forget . . . [a] pungent smell, a burnt smell . . . It was a vision that I

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didn’t want to remember and that I can’t forget.” The appalling smells and images of scorched flesh return involuntarily to the soldier’s consciousness and become a traumatic memory only in relation to a different time and place, the smell of the cigarette reenacting memories of the war that now, in a deferred action, take on a traumatic meaning. The soldier wanted to forget, not to know, not to remember the ordeal of the defiled body in real time. Thus, the threatening event continues to haunt him and repeatedly reappears both in his dreams and in his everyday life. He says, “It’s unbelievable that you’re there, and that’s what you’re seeing. Sometimes I see myself going up to my position, I don’t remember everything that happened there, but I want to remember.” Another soldier says that “It’s like becoming part of a film, really, a film,” and “basically what you see there is like stuff from the films . . . war films.” Another soldier testified, “I’m running for my life and I’m unable to run.” For the soldiers, the battle is remembered as a nightmare, or a war film. Like a viewer at the cinema, the soldier sees himself trapped in a sequence of horrendous images that unfold in front of his eyes. The soldiers’ traumatic recollections do not necessarily consist of linear relations between cause (the traumatic event) and effect (its representation in memory), between the referent in reality and the sign that represents it. Rather, fantasy and the unconscious play a central role in the formation of the soldiers’ catastrophic memories of the historical past.11 Janet Walker describes the connection between reality and fantasy in cinematic representations of traumatic memory as “disremembering”: “The process described by psychological literature as that of conjuring mental images and sounds related to past events but altered in certain respects shall be termed ‘disremembering.’ Disremembering is not the same as not remembering. It is remembering with a difference . . . Disremembering can become urgent when events are personally unfathomable or socially unacceptable. Disremembering . . . is a survival strategy par excellence.”12 The soldiers’ traumatic memories are “disremembered” memories: they are discontinued recollections, constructed by forgetting, and altered by fragments of fantasy. Disremembering makes it possible for the soldier to talk about and represent an event that is too threatening to experience directly. Memories of this kind testify to the very unrepresentability of the event that the soldier is trying to remember. It is no coincidence that the director Nurit Kedar chose to interview the soldiers on the artificial set of the feature film Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, 2007), which fictitiously re-created the famous military post. Kedar points to the central

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role of cinema—as a kind of fantasy—in representing the unrepresentable and in exposing muted traumatic memories. Wasted marks one of the most striking phenomena in contemporary Israeli cinema: films that explore repressed traumatic events from the First Lebanon War—events that have been denied entry into the shared national past. Another such film is Beaufort (winner the Silver Bear at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival and was a nominee for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), which is based on a best-selling novel by Ron Leshem, If There is a Heaven (2005), itself based on the memories of soldiers who served at Beaufort in 1999–2000. Beaufort deals with the trauma of the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, and with the soldiers’ anxieties and fears that they had been abandoned by the army and the state on the isolated outpost. Another film that explores repressed traumatic events is Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), an animated documentary based on video footage that describes the journey taken by the director—who is also the film’s central character—in search of his lost and forgotten memories of the horrors of the First Lebanon War, in particular of the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps. Finally, the film Lebanon (2009)—which is based on the traumatic war memories of the scriptwriter–director, Shmuel Maoz—portrays the attempts to rescue a group of Israeli soldiers who were trapped inside the tank in a Lebanese village that was surrounded by Syrian commando forces. The film documents the distress and anxiety of the soldiers who observe the horrors of the battle outside through the tank’s gun sights. The First Lebanon War left searing marks on Israeli national memory. The longest and most controversial of all Israel’s wars, it started in 1982 with what was meant to be a short two- or three-month operation—euphemistically called “Operation Peace for Galilee”—with the objective of protecting Israel’s northern settlements. The war ended three years later, in June 1985. However, it was only after 18 years that the Israeli government declared a final withdrawal of all IDF forces from Lebanon. When the war began, it enjoyed wide support from the Israeli public, but this diminished as the extent of the battles, their true objective (bringing about a new political order in Lebanon and the Middle East), and the number of casualties came to light. It was a political war that weakened the Israeli right and led to Begin’s resignation as prime minister and his departure from politics. It was a war that aroused widespread opposition, with the public asking whether the war’s objectives had been met, whether Israel’s presence in Lebanon was necessary, and whether the cost in terms of casualties was worth paying. As

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the IDF became embroiled ever deeper in the problems of Lebanon’s internal politics, public opposition intensified, reaching its peak after the massacres in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The war would later be known as “a war of choice,” and “the other war.”13 The First Lebanon War has featured in a number of films, such as Ricochets (Eli Cohen, 1982), Fragments (Yossi Zomer, 1989), Final Cup (Eran Riklis, 1991), and The Cherry Season (Haim Buzaglo, 1991). Most of these films are critical of Zionist ideals and the Israeli government’s belligerent policies, and they aspired to offer a “leftist” political portrayal of the war that had exacted a heavy price from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, some of them were ultimately subjugated to a pro-Israel “liberal-humanist” ideological perspective. From this perspective, the films mostly described the Israeli soldier’s psychological deliberations and pangs of conscience. This soldier was represented as an “enlightened” occupier who “shoots and weeps,” sensitive to and identifying with the Palestinians’ suffering, and feeling and seeing himself as persecuted. Ricochets, for example, purports to demonstrate the Israeli soldier’s moral supremacy. On the one hand, it sketches out an optimistic fantasy of the relations between the Israeli soldier and Lebanon’s Shiite refugee population: Effi, one of the soldiers, gives some chocolate to a Shiite woman, who gives him some cherries in return. On the other hand, the film also portrays the political situation as a dead end. In one scene, Georgie, the army cook, explains the complexities of the situation in Lebanon to Gadi, the new officer: “The Christians hate the Druze and the Shiites—so do the Sunni and the Palestinians. The Druze hate the Christians, the Shiites and the Syrians . . . The Sunni hate whoever their bosses tell them to hate, and not only do the Palestinians hate everyone else, they hate each other as well . . . And they’ve all got one thing in common: they all hate—and you’ve no idea how much—us Israelis.” This comic representation of Lebanon’s socio-political dynamics leads to the final and seemingly “correct” conclusion that Israel is the innocent victim of the Arabs’ irrational hatred.14 Other films, such as Cup Final and The Cherry Season, were more radical in their critique of the First Lebanon War. As Nurith Gertz argues, “just as Ricochets portrays the justice of the Israeli cause and Cup Final repudiates it, Cherry Season portrays Israeli justice as utterly irrelevant and the war as utterly perverse.”15 And yet, rather than telling the Palestinian story, the aim of these films was to ease the liberal conscience of not only theirs but also their directors, who belonged to the Israeli peace camp. Israeli cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s represented the embarrassment and helplessness of the Israeli left after it had recognized

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the Palestinian other as the victim of Jewish-Israeli oppression. The failure of the war, and the traumatic events associated with it, are not fully addressed and mourned by Israeli cinema at that time. In revisiting the traumatic and unspoken recollections of the First Lebanon War, the films Wasted, Beaufort, Waltz with Bashir, and Lebanon are less concerned with the history of the war than with the private and subjective experiences and memories of the soldiers who fought in it. They describe combatants for whom time has stopped, who are haunted by the horrifying images of the battlefield, sometimes even after the war has ended. Their emphasis on the subjective dimension of memories and experiences from the war distances these films from the war’s historical context—which is represented only partially and sometimes hazily—and leads them to an atemporal zone marked by symbols and private hallucinations. Drawn away from the continuities of national history, the films enter an ambiguous world of individual allusions, a mysterious world signified by displacements and repetitions that characterize dreams and fantasies.16 These films point to both the tremendous need to remember and represent one of the most traumatic wars in the history of the State of Israel and to the difficulty of doing so. To an extent, the specific form taken by memory in these films—the distance between memory and history, the subjective and personal nature of memories, and the difficulty to represent and capture the past—have been analyzed, albeit in a different context, by the French historian, Pierre Nora.17 Despite its title, Nora’s “Between History and Memory,” is less an analysis of the relations between “history” and “memory,” and more a melancholic reflection on the loss of the tradition of national historical memory.18 “Memory is constantly on our lips,” Nora claims, “because it no longer exists.”19 In analyzing why memory “no longer exists,” Nora describes a number of stages of loss. He begins with “primitive” or “archaic” societies, whose memories were “real” and through which values were transmitted from one generation to the next. These were societies that connected people with their ancestors and to “the undifferentiated time of heroes, inceptions, and myths.”20 With the collapse of these societies and the subsequent “acceleration of history,” people become detached from “real” memory and forced to enter the world of history. Here, Nora contrasts history and memory: Memory is life, always embodied in living societies . . . History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is always a phenomenon of the present . . . History is a representation

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of the past . . . [it] calls for analysis and critical discourse. Memory situates remembrance in a scared context . . . Memory is rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, image, and object. History dwells exclusively on temporal continuities, on changes in things and in the relations among things. Memory is absolute, while history is always relative.21

Despite the basic distinction between them, Nora argues that the traditional idea of the nation enabled proximity between history and memory. He believes that national historical memory—or what he terms “history-memory”—provided a sense of unity and continuity, a dimension of “sacredness,” which had previously characterized the “real” memory of traditional societies. Aspects of the nation such as “the political, the military, the biographical, and the diplomatic were all pillars of continuity.”22 However, with the post-Enlightenment disintegration of the idea of the nation as a sacred entity based on shared values and traditions and the rise of the secular multicultural society, historical memory lost its national role. As a result of the decline of the idea of collective national identity, history lost its mission, its pedagogical purpose, and its sacredness. History was no longer the essential link between the past, the present, and the future; it ceased to be imbued with the “collective consciousness,” and it no longer served the nation: “history became a social science; and memory became a purely private phenomenon.”23 Thus, Nora Claims, private memories replaced collective national memory. Such personal memories express the experiences and ensure the continuity not of the nation but rather of various social groups. These groups, which are united through common historical experience, or by religious or ethnic affiliation, are dependent on private memories for their communal identity and solidarity. When memory departs from the realm of the nation, Nora argues, it undergoes a shift “from the historical to the psychological, from the social to the individual . . . As a result of this psychologization, the self now stands in a new relation to memory and the past.”24 While the historical memory of the nation offered a spontaneous connection with the past, today people depend on private memories in order to make sense of their identity. Thus, they experience memory as a duty. This duty to remember drives people to create archives, “places of memory” (lieux de mémoire) aimed at preserving each and every trace or fragment of the past. Paradoxically, however, these places—from museums and monuments to symbolic ceremonies and festivities—actually distance us from the past. Places of memory stop time, thus creating a discontinuity that separates us from what came before. “Places of

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memory,” writes Nora, “have no referents in reality; or, rather, they are their own referents—pure signs. This is not to say that they are without content, physical presence, or history—on the contrary. But what makes them lieux de mémoire is precisely that which allows them to escape from history.”25 Nora’s account of modern memory largely accords with the structure of memory in Beaufort, a film which reveals and highlights a rupture, or a discontinuity, between history (or national historical memory) and memory. Yet at the same time, the film nostalgically expresses an impossible yearning for lost collective national memory. In the film, the war is represented as the private memory of a distinct social group—the combat unit that manned the famous outpost in the final months before the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon—and not as collective memory, as a lived and practiced tradition that conditions Israeli society. The period surrounding the withdrawal is represented as traumatic for the soldiers, who feel that they have been abandoned by the army and the state, have lost their national purpose and identity, and excluded from the nation’s historical memory. This detachment from national collective memory pulls the film into a world marked by a persistent blurring of the historical context and by private and subjective impressions—a timeless world of dreams, hallucinations, and myths. However, the trauma of abandonment, which both produces and marks the distance from the national shared past, arouses in the soldiers, especially the unit’s officer—and indeed in the film itself—anxieties about the loss of masculine national authority and domination. Faced with the absence of national supervision and collective historical memory, the unit’s officer, Liraz Liberti (Oshri Cohen), feels personally obliged to remember the national past. He constructs the Beaufort as a “place of memory,” a kind of national archive, so as to give meaning to his identity. However, the protagonist’s archival desire for the national past, his nostalgia for a lost collective memory, is rendered impossible by the traumatic distance between national history and memory. Beaufort, thus, mourns the loss of collective memory and bears witness to the collapse of historical national memory in Israel.

Forgotten army The withdrawal from Lebanon damaged the IDF’s status both within and beyond Israel. Most of the Israel public, which had become tired with what it saw as pointless military fatalities in Lebanon, and which refused to continue paying

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in human life for control over territories outside Israel’s borders, supported the full and unilateral withdrawal of IDF forces from the “security zone” in southern Lebanon. The army’s leadership opposed the withdrawal because the retreat of a large army with plentiful resources in the face of a relatively weak enemy such as the Hezbollah might have undermined the IDF’s image in the eyes of both Israeli soldiers and citizens, as well as in the eyes of the enemy. In March 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak gave the order for an immediate withdrawal. The IDF was pleased with how the withdrawal proceeded, especially in bureaucratic and operational terms: it was a fast exit that took less than 48 hours, with no loss of life, following the dismantling of a great deal of equipment. However, neither the army nor the government were able to prevent the Palestinian public and the wider Arab population—or even Israelis to some extent—from seeing the withdrawal as shameful for Israel. The IDF was perceived as a humiliated and defeated army that had lost its power and the aura of courage and heroism that associated with it for so many years. The IDF’s image as a failing army was also highlighted after the second Intifada broke out in September 2000 when IDF’s Chief of Staff at that time, Moshe “Boogie” Ya’alon, said, “We have renewed our power of deterrence. We have compensated for the outcome of the withdrawal from Lebanon.”26 Ya’alon’s comments emphasize the idea that the violent suppression of the Palestinian Intifada was intended to counter the image of the IDF’s defeat—an image that was dismissed from the official national narrative— and to restore a sense of national unity to Israeli society and revive its belief in the power of the army. Beaufort expresses the fear of the loss of the Israeli army’s authority and dominance in the light of the approaching withdrawal from Lebanon. The film does not deal with the actual historical event but rather focuses on the soldiers’ subjective experiences and sense of anxiety, expressing individual and traumatic experiences, and memories of the war that had previously been denied entry into the national historical narrative. The withdrawal from Lebanon is described in the film as traumatic for the soldiers, who feel as though they have been abandoned both by the army and the state, and by the Israeli public. These combatants, who were brought up on the heroic myths of sacrifice and death, feel that their national mission has lost its way and its purpose, and that they have been forgotten on foreign soil. They feel like victims of a national and political conflict, with nothing they can do but wait for the politicians to determine their fate while the enemy kills them almost daily. At the beginning of the film, the soldiers are physically trapped on the mountain because the access

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road has been mined; the only way in or out of the post is by helicopter. Ziv Faran (Ohad Knoller), a bomb disposal officer, arrives at the outpost in order to clear the road. For the soldiers, his arrival carries the promise of fresh supplies reaching the mountain and of having some contact with the world beyond. The commander of the unit, Liraz, and his second-in-command, Oshri (Eli Eltonyo), welcome him: “Have you come to rescue us?” they say, in a mixture of jest and desperation. Frightened somewhat by the constant shelling of the outpost, Ziv asks with concern, “Is it always like this?” Liraz and Oshri reply sarcastically: “No, until you arrived everything was fine. Welcome to Beaufort!” (Figure 6.2). The spatial layout of the Beaufort outpost reflects the soldiers’ feelings of helplessness, entrapment, and isolation. The distance the film takes from Israeli nationalism leads it to represent Beaufort not only as a historical site, but also, if not primarily, as a site that is detached from specific time and space, a twilight zone in between reality and myth, past and present, life and death. The outpost is made up of an intricate network of narrow and winding underground corridors. As they make their way through them, the soldiers look like laboratory mice running through a twisting and claustrophobic maze. The soldiers sleep in beds hanging from the ceiling of a long container that they call the “submarine,” a name that highlights their detachment from the external world (Figure 6.3). Just like in a submarine, the soldiers are dependent on technological equipment

Figure 6.2 “Welcome to Beaufort!” (Cedar, 2007). Courtesy of Joseph Cedar.

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Figure 6.3 The internal space of the Beaufort outpost: Koris in the “submarine” (Cedar, 2007). Courtesy of Joseph Cedar.

in order to maintain contact with the outside world. Aboveground, the outpost is made of many concrete layers that have been added over the years, appearing to bury the soldiers alive (Figure 6.4). The concrete walls block the cinematic frame that closes in on the soldiers, restricting their movement in space. Much of the time the outpost is cloaked in heavy fog, which impedes the soldiers’ visibility and their spatial orientation. It also gives a sense of antirealism to a place that is simultaneously constructed as real and imagined, that exists and does not exist. The space of Beaufort can be described in Michel Foucault’s terms as a heterotopia. In contrast to a utopia, which is a site that has no real place, while the conditions for it to become so are clear, a heterotopia—which literally means “other place”—is a real place, a site that subsists in time and space, a place that exists and yet does not exist. One of Foucault’s examples of a heterotopia is the ship—or in the case of this film, the “submarine”—which is in itself a closed space, while at the same time floating on an infinite sea. Heterotopias are both part of the social order, reflecting and reinforcing it, while also inverting it. According to Foucault, heterotopias are “sometimes like counter-sites, a kind of effective enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within our culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted.”27

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Figure 6.4 The external space of the Beaufort outpost: Concrete layers that seem to bury the soldiers alive (Cedar, 2007). Courtesy of Joseph Cedar.

Because it is a conquered space, the Beaufort outpost reinforces the Israeli national and ideological order. At the same time, though, its workings are disrupted and it lacks a clear purpose. According to a notice hanging in the outpost, the purpose of this space is “[t]o protect the northern border of the State of Israel.” However, because they cannot see the enemy, the soldiers do not understand what they are protecting or from whom. The Beaufort outpost represents military law and order and is supposed to control the space that surrounds it, but in fact it is a chaotic and claustrophobic space that functions in an entirely disorderly and confused fashion, a space that is constantly on the defensive. The outpost is an enclave within enemy territory that abides by the rules of the State of Israel, yet it is also detached from it, or has even been abandoned by it. Foucault claims that heterotopias are “simultaneously mythical and real.”28 In one scene, one of the soldiers, Tomer Zitlawy (Itai Turgeman) ironically describes their purpose on Beaufort: “We’re guarding the mountain to make sure it doesn’t run away.” The mountain of Beaufort is simultaneously marked as real and mythological. The soldiers’ presence makes it real, as if the mountain would run away if they were not there. Foucault also discusses cemeteries as heterotopic spaces that exist and do not exist: they contain the remains of the dead along with the fact of their death or nonexistence. In one episode in the film, Ziv wanders around the surreal space of Beaufort. Scared and confused, he loses his way in the winding labyrinth of corridors until he

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eventually finds himself above ground, where the outpost is immersed in a thick fog. In addition to the living soldiers, the outpost’s guard positions are also manned by mannequins dressed in army uniform. These are “living-dead” soldiers, designed to deceive the enemy and draw his fire. However, Ziv thinks that the mannequin is a real soldier, and starts talking to it. The mannequin is charged with the effect of the Freudian uncanny, the “living-dead,” both familiar and friendly, while at the same time alien and threatening.29 Between the sandbags and the fortifications, Ziv meets Zitlawy, who calls him from his guard post: “You got lost? . . . You’ve come far away, as far as you can get. You only come here by mistake.” Zitlawy concludes their conversation by howling like a wolf, in keeping with the morbid graveyard atmosphere of the scene. Throughout the film the soldiers are portrayed as children who have been abandoned by their parents. When Ziv arrives at Beaufort he asks the soldiers: “Do your parents know you’re here?” Even Liraz, who calls his soldiers “my children” a number of times during the film, is represented as an abandoned child. (“My mother hasn’t known where I am since I was nine.”) These sentiments of abandonment are constructed in the film as a crisis not only in the relations between fathers and sons, but also between soldiers and their commanders, who are perceived as defeated men who have submitted to public and political pressure to avoid military action against the enemy, and who are therefore neglecting their soldiers. The failure of patriarchal military authority to take care of its “children” makes the soldiers anxious about their loss of power and the decline of masculine heterosexual dominance. “We’ve become an army of pussies! They’re shafting us, wasting our men, and your answer is protection?!” protests Liraz stridently to his commander, Kimchy (Alon Abutbul), who refuses to initiate any combat so close to the withdrawal. Liraz asks for permission to go out “with the children” and fight the enemy: “Why isn’t the IDF reacting? If we’re retreating then let’s go, give the order, we’ll get in the vehicles and get the fuck out of here. If we’re staying, and I don’t see us leaving right now, then let us do our job . . . You stand here like an idiot and get hit by a missile. We’re bankrupt. Four old ladies beat us. They’re right!” From Liraz’s perspective, preventing the soldiers from fighting places them in a passive and “feminine” position that is seen as unheroic, humiliating, and castrating, a position that is represented as threatening to male heterosexual dominance and autonomy. The soldiers’ masculinity is not only endangered by the enemy, but also by women: the Four Mothers movement—or, as Liraz calls them, the four “old ladies”—a protest movement founded in 1997 by four female residents of the north of

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Israel whose sons had served in Lebanon, with the aim of bringing about the IDF’s withdrawal from Lebanon. In a different scene, Zilwaty talks about the “Four Mothers” movement as being “four old whores who don’t know shit about the army and who are telling lies to the whole country.” According to the soldiers, the women’s protest against the war has feminized the army, which in turn has undermined the fighters’ military and masculine worthiness and disconnected them from the paternal authority of their commanders. The trauma of abandonment, which creates and signifies the rupture between the soldiers’ personal experience and national history, is represented, therefore, as a crisis of heterosexual masculinity. This crisis, which has befallen Israeli masculinity just prior to the withdrawal from the Lebanon, compels Liraz to assume the position of the failed father and to try and reconstitute masculine military national memory (Figure 6.5). Liraz is represented as a cold and determined officer who is steadfastly faithful to the army and its national mission. Even though, or perhaps precisely because, he is aware that he and his comrades are merely sitting ducks for the enemy, he does not question the importance of the soldiers’ presence on the mountain. As the unit’s medic, Idan Koris (Itay Tiran) observes, “Liraz is just what the army needs here. Someone who’ll thank them for letting him be in charge of this mountain.” Liraz refuses to accept the

Figure 6.5 Liraz, the commander of Beaufort (Cedar, 2007). Courtesy of Joseph Cedar.

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news of the impending evacuation of the outpost and rejects his historical role as the last commander of Beaufort. He says, “I don’t deserve to be the one who fled from Beaufort.” He fanatically sustains both the myth of the heroism of the soldiers who conquered the mountain and the memory of those who fell in the battle. In one scene, Ziv—whose father fought at Beaufort and whose uncle died in the battle to capture it—tells Liraz and the other soldiers that an order had actually been given not to capture the mountain, but that it appeared not to have reached the soldiers. “They could have come up here without a battle and without casualties,” he says. Defending the honor and bravery of the soldiers who had fought like men, Liraz replies, “You could say that about every battle. The fact is that the troops fought here like men!” Liraz sees himself and his soldiers as carrying on a dynasty of combat soldiers. He calls the mannequin soldiers “reinforcements” who are “doing their job.” He sees them as ghosts of soldiers whose death leads continuously to the future of the nation, just as the names of all of Beaufort’s fallen soldiers are engraved on the huge memorial board that hangs in the outpost’s canteen. Through their deaths, these “living-dead” soldiers direct the lives of Liraz and his generation who are carrying on the legacy of male warriors and the national heritage. Liraz commemorates and remembers the heroic soldiers, gives their lives and deaths a national meaning, shapes himself through them, and sees himself as if he were them. Moreover, Liraz wishes to pass down this legacy to the next generation of combat soldiers. When his soldiers ask him about the impending evacuation, he answers: “Look, calm down. We’re not leaving so quickly. I think your children will be here too.” By creating an intergenerational linkage, Liraz hopes to heal the crisis in relations between fathers and their combat soldier sons. He produces a narrative of masculine historical memory by which the second generation is continuously linked to the past generation, thus “making sense” of its national (male) identity. Liraz therefore sees himself as responsible not only for looking after his soldiers but also for guarding the patriarchal national memory that has been preserved, accumulated, and stored within Beaufort. Toward the end of the film, a few hours before the IDF troops leave Beaufort, one of the soldiers says to him: “Try to imagine the mountain without the outpost . . . just nature, no memory of anything.” Liraz is unable to imagine it. For him, Beaufort is not just another military outpost but rather a “place of memory,” a kind of national archive. He desires to find a forgotten heroic national past in this archive, a trace of the lost patriarchal origin, which would enable him to define and attribute meaning to his very own identity.

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Archive trauma However, the archive is not a place that innocently and neutrally preserves and contains the past. Rather it is unreliable, selective, and incomplete, and is based on excluding and repressing traumatic content that threatens to return from it.30 In the case of Beaufort, the trauma is that of paternal abandonment, which signifies the discontinuity between the past and the present, between history and memory, and which Liraz tries to repress. In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida writes that, “Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word ‘archive’ . . . Nothing is more troubled and troubling.”31 His examination of the archive begins with the Greek arkhe that “names at once the commencement and the commandment.”32 It names at once “the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence—physical, historical, or ontological principle—but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised in this place from which order is given—nomological principle.”33 The archive yearns to return to the origin, to discover the primordial memory, to preserve the past, to find and possess the moments of beginning that appear to us as a kind of truth. However, preserving the past is always violent. The archive, which decides what is worthy of being remembered, thereby determines which things will be forgotten. In other words, the archive’s desire to rescue and document the past, to possess human memory once and for all, cannot be satisfied without the perpetual threat of silence, without the possibility of forgetting. According to Derrida, the excessive, infinite, and inexhaustible passion of the archive to return to the moments of the beginning is fundamentally linked to the Freudian death drive, which seeks to destroy the archive. The death drive is a destructive, aggressive, and violent force that encourages forgetfulness, amnesia, and the negation of memory. It is “anarchivic” or “archivolithic”:34 “If there is no archive without consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization, of repetition, or of reimpression, then we must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive.”35 According to Freud, repetition compulsion is acting out without remembering, repeating without recollecting. Following Freud, Derrida argues that the archive is established through repetition compulsion, which is related to the death drive. Time and again we return to the archive, to the memory of the past, in order to confirm and preserve it. Yet there is no repetition without the death

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drive, without violence, without the possibility of forgetting traumatic content that would sabotage the archive’s desire to return to the absolute beginning, to return to the original past event. Therefore, the death drive is a violent force that simultaneously generates and destroys the archive. The archive is self-contradictory in that it must necessarily incorporate forgetting, and because it is produced by repetition compulsion of both memory and forgetting. We are destined to make this “fatal repetition,” thus, we cannot control the archive; we cannot place ourselves outside the archive and say, “that is the correct and true meaning,” or, “that is exactly how things happened.” We are forever included within the archive, trapped in the repetition compulsion of remembering and forgetting the past. However, the national archive does not recognize the violent repetition that structures the archive, and represses the fact that the archive can never be complete and final. “The archive,” summarizes John D. Caputo, “has also come to mean the house, arkheion, where records are stored, a house overseen by archons, the keepers of the house, the patri-archival powers that be who oversee the archive. That is why there is always the danger of ‘politics of the archive,’ . . . the feverish control that is exercised by institutional authority, above all the state, over archival materials, the politics of . . . the ‘official story.’ Political power requires control over the archive, the monitoring of memory.”36 It is a power that “aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In the archive, there should not be any absolute dissolution, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate, or partition, in an absolute manner.”37 Derrida argues that this power lies at the basis of nationalism—the desire to kill and burn the other’s memory, to silence and delete all traces of traumatic events within the archive. In Beaufort, Liraz is a kind of archon, the gatekeeper of the Beaufort archive, supervising and controlling the memory stored within it. He longs to make his version of the memory of the battle into the authoritative, normative, and nomological version. He wants to see it as the origin and the law for everyone else, and exercises power and control over the other’s archive in order to oppress and repress alternative interpretations of past events. As a “patri-archival” power, he insists on the patriarchal heritage of the war, and because Ziv’s version of the capture of Beaufort questions the myth of the national memory of heroism and sacrifice, Liraz rejects it outright. In one episode, Liraz’s commander tells him about his own personal traumatic experience from the time that Beaufort was captured: “I was wounded before the battle even started. I was lying in the

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APC, hearing on the radio about how my friends were being killed.” “Yes, but you conquered it like heroes!” Liraz replies. “At least you fought! There was an enemy, a goal, a purpose. You took the most important mountain in Lebanon.” Liraz seeks to exclude threatening specters that have not been properly addressed or sufficiently mourned, and tries to impose a national meaning on both the dead and the living. He wants to control the archive, to protect and preserve the national past, to remember it in order to produce a complete and coherent masculine national identity for the generations of fighters that preceded him, for himself, and for those who will come after he has gone. Koris is the only soldier who openly contradicts his commanding officer’s authority and his attempt to repress traumatic events—Ziv’s unnecessary death, and the soldiers’ abandonment: “The man just died for no reason. I still haven’t understood what he died for. And why aren’t we allowed to talk about the evacuation at all? Are we stupid children? . . . I want him [Liraz] to stand up like a man and to tell us to our faces that in two weeks the Hezbollah’s going to be sitting here, and that everything the IDF is doing now is bullshit.” Liraz is a “boyish-man,” a boy who is not yet a man, who desperately longs to assume the role of the failed father, to become a figure of parental authority for his soldiers, to heal the rift between national historical memory and personal memory. However, his desire to seek out the lost patriarchal origin, to return over and again to the memory of heroism, which is seen as the unique archive of the “truth,” is always violent, and includes the forgetting of traumatic events that threaten to unsettle the official national narrative that is stored in the archive. In other words, Liraz wishes to return to the national archive and, from a meta-archival perspective—a point outside the archive where one can supervise and oversee—to extract “true” meaning from it, though without acknowledging that this repetition compulsion must always be violent and based on forgetting and repression. Liraz’s efforts to return to and sustain the national myth and to identify with the paternal position necessarily involve repeating the repressed trauma of abandonment that is preserved in the archive. Therefore, he has no structural control over the archive; he is incorporated within it, trapped in the repetition compulsion of both remembering and forgetting. He is unaware of this fatal repetition and is fated to blindly reproduce the past, to act out the traumatic event of abandonment without remembering it. Liraz’s reaction to the wounding and death of four of his soldiers demonstrates this notion of repeating the trauma of being abandoned by the father though without remembering it. When Ziv arrives at the outpost, he refuses to disarm the

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mine that is blocking the access road to Beaufort, saying that it is too dangerous. Liraz rebukes him, and orders him to carry out the mission. He tells Ziv: “I know it’s dangerous . . . Who asked you anyway!” The order is finally given, and Ziv embarks on his mission. Later on, Liraz apologizes for his outburst, and tries to assume a position of paternal authority when he volunteers to keep guard over Ziv while he neutralizes the mine, and also by calling him “youngster.” Ziv, however, resists the infantile position in which he has been placed, and in turn calls Liraz “child,” thus pointing out the young officer’s unattainable aspirations to take on the role of the father. Ziv succeeds in clearing the route, but pays for it with his life when the mine explodes and kills him. Paralyzed and shocked, Liraz is unable to drag himself away from the horrendous sight of Ziv’s mutilated body. Liraz has failed in his parental role; he abandoned his “son” and sent him to his death. The traumatic event of the abandonment is too overwhelming, and it is not recorded in his consciousness. Liraz represses the catastrophe of Ziv’s abandonment only so as to return to it once again when Zitlawy is killed by a rocket that hits his guard position. Liraz rushes to the bombed out guard post, but arrives too late to save Zitlawy. The film marks this scene as a kind of fantasy: we see Liraz falling asleep, and then waking up in a panic and running to his friend, who has already been hit. Thus, Liraz phantasmatically repeats the prior traumatic experience of abandonment, which was too shocking to be given meaning. In his fantasy, Liraz acts out the trauma of abandonment that he did not want to remember. He tries once more take the role of the father, but again fails to save his “son,” who ultimately dies. Later on in the film, two scenes that depict the wounding and deaths of other soldiers reproduce the structure that had appeared in the two earlier scenes, thus reinforcing the notion that Liraz compulsively repeats and acts out the trauma of abandonment without recalling it. While recovering Zitlawy’s body, Oshri, Liraz’s second-in-command, is wounded when a rocket lands just outside the outpost. Lying bleeding on the ground, Oshri calls out to Liraz to rescue him. Once again, though, Liraz stands paralyzed in front of his abandoned comrade, observing him from the outpost, and is unable to proffer assistance. Liraz is incapable of coping with the trauma of abandoning his “son” (he even refuses to leave Beaufort in order to visit the injured Oshri in hospital), but is doomed to repeat the tragic event once more when another soldier, Yonatan Shpitzer (Arthur Perzev), is killed by a rocket fired at the same guard position that Zitlway had been manning when he died. None of the soldiers had wanted to guard at that cursed post, and Shpitzer had only volunteered after persistent pleading by Liraz.

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Before Shpitzer’s death, taking leave of his usual cold and distanced self, Liraz had tried to get closer to Shpitzer, to cheer him up and offer some paternal support for his frightened “son.” The scene in which Shpitzer is killed is also marked as a kind of dream: Liraz has fallen asleep for a few minutes, and he wakes up in a panic to see the smoldering outpost and the dead body of his “son.” Having sent his “son” to die at the cursed guard position, Liraz now runs toward him, desperately calling his name. Once again, though, he is too late. The traumatic experience of abandonment by the father keeps on returning phantasmatically to haunt Liraz while he wishes to forget that which must be remembered. The film thus points to the intergenerational trauma that returns from the archive to haunt the protagonist: the son, who identifies with the role of the parent, repeats the trauma of abandonment inflicted upon him by the father, and fails to step into the paternal position. This intergenerational trauma is also given expression through the song that Shpitzer sings before he dies. The song is called “Fathers and Sons,” and the chorus contains the line, “A father is crying over a son is crying over a father.” In another scene, Liraz is watching a television interview with Ziv’s bereaved father. At one point in the interview, the father looks directly into the camera, that is, at Liraz, and says: “You could blame the army, the generals, but the army isn’t really responsible for my son. They don’t know him at all. I am responsible for him. I brought him up. Apparently, I didn’t bring him up well . . . I feel as though I abandoned my child.” In contrast to the bereaved father, Liraz does not take responsibility for the abandonment of the soldiers, and tries to censor and repress the traumatic phantoms that return from the archive.

Beaufort fever Liraz insists on remembering and commemorating the national past, and continues to deny the trauma of abandonment until the very last moments of the film. When the order is given to evacuate Beaufort, mines are laid throughout the outpost, turning it into an enormous gunpowder barrel. When all the preparations for the explosion have been completed, Liraz is told that the evacuation is to be delayed by 24 hours. Koris warns of the danger to the soldiers who remain on the mined outpost, and is angry at his commander, who he sees as lacking the courage to evacuate them. “They’ve left us exposed!” he says. Liraz

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denies that they have been abandoned: “If need be, an entire army will come and get us out of here . . . They wouldn’t abandon us!” Koris shouts at him angrily: “You think that anyone cares about us?!” to which Liraz painfully admits: “I cannot abandon this mountain. Something is physically holding me back.” Liraz is suffering from archive fever, from a painful desire for the unattainable origin. As Derrida puts it: It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no “mal-de” can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d’archive.38

Liraz’s archive desire is an infinite passion for absolute law, an interminable passion to return to the very beginning, to the apparently original event of the glorious capture of the mountain, an irrepressible and sick nostalgia for the heroic memory of the past of Israeli national masculinity. Little wonder that during his last night at Beaufort, Liraz raises the Israeli flag up the flagpole from which it had previously been lowered. Repetition is a necessary part of Liraz’s unique and select archive; it keeps that archive alive, keeps the archive moving. However, this repetition compulsion leads to the death drive, to the violence of forgetting the trauma, which returns from the archive and prevents Liraz’s passion from returning to the most archaic place of “absolute commencement.” In other words, the death drive is a violent force of forgetting that generates the archive, while at the same time works in silence and under concealment to destroy the archive. It bears “the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law and its tradition.”39 Because the traumatic specters that are stored in the archive sabotage Liraz’s efforts to “settle all accounts,” his desire for the lost origin is thus a desire that can never be satisfied. The Beaufort archive is a heterotopic space that resists any attempt of a homogenization of the past. It disrupts the protagonist’s endeavors to produce a unified and continuous narrative and myth of national memory, and emphasizes the discontinuity between collective and contemporary memory. The death drive at work in the archive acts against the intentions of its maker.

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And indeed, at the end of the film, the Beaufort archive explodes and is destroyed, eliminating any chance of closure or totalization of past events (Figure 6.6). Liraz watches the burning outpost from a distance as is it consumed by fire and turns to ash (Figure 6.7). Liraz’s burning archival passion is destroyed by the same aggressive force that created it. In other words, the law bears its own death. All that remains of the archive are the ghosts of the mannequin soldiers and the memorial board with the names of Beaufort’s fallen. They too go up in flames, remnants and traces of the silenced trauma that haunts Beaufort and the protagonist. In the final scene of the film, the soldiers leave Beaufort and Lebanon. They hug one another emotionally and call their parents to tell them excitedly that they have come home. Liraz is the only one not to share in their joy. He walks down the road by himself, removes his heavy protective flak jacket and his military overall, leans forward, places his hands on his bent knees, breathes out heavily and cries, as if nauseous, or maybe sick—sick with archive fever. Beaufort expresses a melancholic nostalgia for a lost mythical world through the archival sickness of its protagonist, a feverish desire for the memory of the national unity of a paternal community free of internal divisions. However, the traumatic loss of collective national memory ruptures the continuity between past and present, indicating the decline of Israeli national memory.

Figure 6.6 The burning archive: The explosion of Beaufort outpost (Cedar, 2007). Courtesy of Joseph Cedar.

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Figure 6.7 Liraz’s “archive fever”: Gazing at the burning Beaufort outpost (Cedar, 2007). Courtesy of Joseph Cedar.

Notes 1 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History,” in Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, ed. Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 8. 2 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 91. 3 Judd Ne’eman, “All Family Movie,” Ma’ariv [in Hebrew], April 27, 2007. All translations from Hebrew are by the author unless otherwise noted. 4 On the metaphor of the “living-dead” soldier in Israeli society and film see Hanan Hever, “Alive are the Dead and Dead are the Living,” Siman Kriah, [in Hebrew] 19 (1986): 190; and Raz Yosef, Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 48–53. 5 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 11–12. 6 Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987), 59. 7 For a full analysis of this film see Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: The Open University Press, 1993), 63–94; and Judd Ne’eman, “The Fields of Dominant Fiction,” Sadan: Research in Hebrew Literature [in Hebrew] (2002): 401–15.

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8 A similar notion appears in the film Kippur (Amos Gitai, 2000), which critically exposes the materiality of the soldier’s bodily pain. Raz Yosef, “Spectacles of Pain: War, Masculinity, and the Masochistic Fantasy in Amos Gitai’s Kippur,” Shofar 24, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 49–66. See also Judd Ne’eman, “The Wound: The Gift of War,” Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel—History, Society, Culture [in Hebrew] 14 (2008): 105–26. 9 Cathy Caruth, Introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4. 10 On trauma as a crisis of representation see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M. D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 11 On the role of fantasy in the construction of traumatic memories in cinema, see Susannah Radstone, “Screening Trauma: Forrest Gump, Film and Memory,” in Memory and Methodology, ed. Susannah Radstone (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000); Thomas Elsaesser, “Postmodernism as Mourning Work,” Screen 42, no. 2, (Summer 2001): 193–201; and E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 12 Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 17, 19. 13 On Israel’s first Lebanon war, see, for example, Giora Rosen, ed. The Lebanon War: Between Protest and Compliance [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1983); Ruvik Rosenthal, Lebanon: The Other War [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1983); Ruvik Rosenthal, The Family of the Beaufort [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1989); Ze’ev Schiff and Ehud Yaari Israel’s Lebanon War, ed. and trans. Ina Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984); On the Israeli media coverage of the first Lebanon war, see Nurith Gertz, Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000). 14 For more on this film and the representation of the First Lebanon War in Israeli cinema in the 1980s and early 1990s, see Shohat, Israeli Cinema, 256–60; Nurith Gertz, “The Medium that Mistook Itself for War: The Cherry Season with Ricochets and Final Cup,” Assaph Kolnoa: Studies in Cinema & Television, Section D, 1 (1998): 33–58; and Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 148, 164. 15 Gertz, “The Medium that Mistook Itself for War,” 53. 16 Dorit Naaman also points to the ways recent post-Oslo Israeli cinema has distanced itself from concrete reality and from realism as a style. While

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Naaman argues that this distance ignores the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and avoids charting a clear notion of borders, I suggest that in the films discussed in this article this rupture marks a radical and traumatic break from national collective memory and history. Dorit Naaman, “Elusive Frontiers: Borders in Israeli and Palestinian Cinemas,” Third Text 20, no. 3/4, (May/July 2006): 511–21. Nora, “Between Memory and History.” This is the introductory article to a multi-volume collaborative project directed by Nora on the national memory of France. For critiques of Nora’s romantic nostalgia for national collective memory, see for instance: Naomi Greene, Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999), 130–58; Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 96–7. Nora, “Between Memory and History,”1. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 19. Nachum Barnea, “It is possible,” Yediot Aharonot, 30 May (2003): 8. For a historical analysis of the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and its consequences for the Israeli army and society, see Lev Grinberg, Imagined Peace, Discourse of War: The Failure of Leadership, Politics, and Democracy in Israel, 1992–2006 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007), 228–32. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, Vol. 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1986): 24. For further discussion of Foucault’s heterotopia, see Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los-Angels and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 145–63. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” trans. Alix Strachey, in Sigmund Freud: Psychological Writings and Letters, ed. Sander L. Gilman (New York: Continuum, 1995), 120–53. On the relation between trauma and the archive see Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003); Herman Rapaport, “Archive Trauma,” in Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 75– 96; Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire:

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31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Deeper than Oblivion Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003). Derrida, Archive Fever, 90. Ibid., 1. Ibid. Ibid., 10. Ibid., 11–12. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 265. Derrida, Archive Fever, 3. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 79.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Caruth, Cathy. Introduction. Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 3–12. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. —. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Cvetkovich, Ann. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Postmodernism as Mourning Work.” Screen 42, no. 2, (Summer 2001): 193–201. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub, M. D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Translated by Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring, 1986): 22–7. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Translated by Alix Strachey. In Sigmund Freud: Psychological Writings and Letters, edited by Sander L. Gilman, 120–53. New York: Continuum, 1995. Gertz, Nurith. Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: The Open University Press, 1993. —. Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000.

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—. “The Medium that Mistook Itself for War: The Cherry Season with Ricochets and Final Cup.” Assaph Kolnoa: Studies in Cinema & Television, Section D, 1 (1998): 33–58. Greene, Naomi. Landscapes of Loss: The National Past in Postwar French Cinema. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999. Grinberg, Lev. Imagined Peace, Discourse of War: The Failure of Leadership, Politics and Democracy in Israel, 1992–2006 [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2007. Hever, Hanan. “Alive are the Dead and Dead are the Living.” Siman Kriah [in Hebrew] 19 (1986): 188–95. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Loshitzky, Yosefa. Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Naaman, Dorit. “Elusive Frontiers: Borders in Israeli and Palestinian Cinemas.” Third Text 20, no. 3/4, (2006): 511–21. Ne’eman, Judd. “The Fields of Dominant Fiction.” Sadan: Research in Hebrew Literature [in Hebrew] (2002): 401–15. —. “The Wound: The Gift of War.” Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel— History, Society, Culture [in Hebrew] 14 (2008): 105–26. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History.” In Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman, 1–20. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Radstone, Susannah. “Screening Trauma: Forrest Gump, Film and Memory.” In Memory and Methodology, edited by Susannah Radstone, 79–107. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000. Rapaport, Herman. “Archive Trauma.” In Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work, 75–96. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Rosen, Giora, ed. The Lebanon War: Between Protest and Compliance [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1983. Rosenthal, Ruvik. Lebanon: The Other War [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1983. —. The Family of the Beaufort [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Sifriat Poalim, 1989. Schiff, Ze’ev and Ehud Yaari. Israel’s Lebanon War. Edited and translated by Ina Friedman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984. Shohat, Ella. Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Soja, Edward W. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los-Angels and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

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Walker, Janet. Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Yosef, Raz. Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004. —. “Spectacles of Pain: War, Masculinity, and the Masochistic Fantasy in Amos Gitai’s Kippur.” Shofar 24, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 49–66.

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Memory of a Death Foretold: Fathers and Sons in Assi Dayan’s “Trilogy” Yael Munk

Interviewee: Answers should be given but he too still has a lot to say . . . Interviewer: Listen, you did not make his life easy, that can be said for sure . . . As far as I understand, he never got angry at you . . . Interviewee: He totally cooperated. He was quite stressed. I don’t know if it was because of the situation or because of the interview, but he was stressed. He was not angry at us, or at least he didn’t express it overtly. Even after this. People said that really . . . They were told that this would not be easy and indeed it was hard. But they were not upset or anything of the kind. He even stayed to exchange a few words and . . . some people . . . I did not see anger . . . all I saw was a kind of despair. Interviewer: His lips trembled . . . Or it just seemed to me . . . The whole thing ... Interviewee: His lips trembled almost all the time. Except for a few times when he became emotional, then his hands also trembled. Generally speaking he didn’t look good. Interviewer: He didn’t look good. Interviewee: No, not at all. Interviewer: When you speak of an atmosphere of depression and despair, what do you mean exactly? How was it expressed? Interviewee: He seemed to me a quite depressed person. Some of our people think, and I’m not sure about it, that toward the end, in the emotional moments, there were tears in his eyes. There is disagreement about it, but some serious people firmly declare this. I didn’t notice it. All I noticed is that he tried to create an emotional atmosphere during the interview, toward the end. . . .

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The above quoted dialogue, broadcast on radio, opens Mr. Baum (1998), the last part of Assi Dayan’s “trilogy.” The words are heard at the film’s very beginning, over a black screen on which the credits appear. They do not refer to a specific event, neither in the film’s narrative nor in Israeli collective memory. At the same time, they sound familiar to the Israeli spectator, who can only speculate about the identity of the person discussed in the interview. The clues, however, are ambiguous. On the one hand, they could refer to the late Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin who was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a Jew, shortly before the film’s release, on November 1995. His name is not mentioned in the dialogue, but some of his personality traits, such as his trembling hands and his tears at certain emotional moments, as well as his interaction with his colleagues who “gave him a hard time” certainly bring to mind Rabin’s last days in the Israeli government. On the other hand, they could also refer to Assi Dayan’s own father, the late General Moshe Dayan, and more particularly to his post-traumatic days after the Yom Kippur War,1 a period that still today, remains to be fully clarified. However, the person being discussed on the radio could equally be any other (not necessarily political) figure in a moment of crisis and confusion. The referential issue here would seem to be less important than the insertion of this dialogue as an introduction to Mr. Baum’s narrative that follows the last 90 minutes in the life of an average Israeli man. As this article will show, these last minutes are in fact the clearest investigation of one of the recurrent tropes in Dayan’s work—collective memory and father-and-son relationships in Israeli society. This article sets out to investigate the traces of this trope in Dayan’s 1990s trilogy—Life according to Agfa (1992), An Electric Blanket Named Moshe (1995), and Mr. Baum (1998),2 as well as in his latest feature film, Dr. Pomerantz (2011), which, in a typical oxymoronic phrasing, was declared by Dayan himself to be the “fourth film in the trilogy.”3 Whereas at first sight these four films (hereafter referred to as the “trilogy”) bear no apparent connection to each other, they all deal with the issue of collective memory and Israeli identity. In fact, Dayan knows these two issues all too well, due to the fact that his very being led him to embody Israeli identity in collective memory not only as the son of Israel’s most famous general, Moshe Dayan, but also in his first cinematic role in Yosef Millo’s now canonical film He Walked through the Fields (1967). In that film, Dayan played the role of Uri Kahana, the new Jew who bravely fought for the Independence of the State of Israel. This role was to turn him into the epitome of the mythological Sabra, that is, as Yael Zerubavel writes, the “New Jew of the Land of Israel,” who was shaped “by an opposition to the negative image

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of the exilic Jew.”4 The Sabra thus personified a desired rupture with the exilic past and its culture, a step that was deemed necessary in order to ensure the opening of a new era in Jewish history. Moreover, as Anat Zanger shows in her research on the Zionist interpretation of the biblical myth of the binding of Isaac (Ha-Akeda) in Israeli culture and cinema, Uri become the symbol of the Sabra who is ready to sacrifice himself and die for the Zionist ethos.5 This article contends that Dayan, who did not choose this role in the Israeli collective memory, devoted his trilogy to the demystification of this image and the revelation of the nonvalidity of the Zionist interpretation of the biblical myth of the binding. He intervenes in Israeli collective memory, defined here as “a set of ideas, images, and feelings about the past,”6 by creating his cinematic “trilogy” in which he deconstructs stereotypes and subverts well-established narrative structures. Dayan’s films thus undermine the secular Binding Myth in Israeli collective memory, attempting in vain to save the son from a death foretold.

After the myth of the binding of Isaac Dayan is acutely aware of the role of the Binding Myth and of collective memory in his life. In 2008, he wrote a piece for Yediot Aharonot, at the time the newspaper with the largest circulation in Israel, pronouncing, among other things, his complex relationship with his father: “My father began his journey alone from 5000 years bce, connecting with our forefathers’ times, seeking the origins of this nation that is responsible for the text [the Bible] that was to become the only real territory of his life, the one he used to tell us about, as if it were a kind of family anecdote about Isaac’s father who, in ten verses, took his only son and was ready to sacrifice him. And, just before recounting the binding, my father would lie on his back, pretending to be a bear, and I, who was only four at the time, would fall on him and he would grasp my hands and bring them to his open mouth, declaiming that ‘Abraham/ don’t go there/ if you go there/ the bear will eat you’ . . . and I would burst out laughing.”7 As Yael Feldman has shown, the Binding Myth may be the best known biblical myth to enter into the secular world of Zionist ideology.8 Indeed, in the early years of statehood, the myth was “converted” in order to fit the new ideological foundations of a Jewish secular nation, thus transforming its narrative from an alliance between man and God to that between man and nation. Today, in retrospect, one may say that the fathers of the nation were only partly aware of

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the dreadful implications of the myth’s secular translation to the relationship between the Jewish fathers and their sons in the young State of Israel. In earlier times, the father considered himself as the unconditional owner of his son’s life and consequently, just like in Greek tragedy, he doomed his son to live in constant fear. However, the idea of the father’s absolute power on his son and the latter’s fear of being sacrificed seem to contradict the Zionist narrative that glorified the son at the expense of his father. According to Feldman, this contradiction was solved, thanks to its compensation through sanctification. The sacrificed soldier became the sanctified victim, and thus entered a new national discourse, the one of the new martyrological tradition, that was to become an integral part of the nation’s code in which fathers and sons unquestioningly played their parts.9 Israeli national cinema, like any other national cultural product of the time, continued to glorify the concept of “heroic death”, that is, the father sacrificing his son on the altar of the nation, and the son being fully aware of the fact that, unlike the biblical figure of Isaac, he will not survive.10 But this era was to reach its end after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, as can be understood from the words of Adam Baruch: “Several dates about the aqedah [binding]: Until ’73 the hero of the aqedah was Abraham (the parents). Since ’73 the hero of the aqedah is Isaac (the sons).”11 Assi Dayan’s trilogy can be considered as a philosophical reflection on the post-Yom Kippur War existential impasse. Introducing flawed fathers and potentially sacrificed, though not necessarily innocent, sons, the trilogy takes this theme one step further and stages the father’s death, a scene that at first sight could be read as the son’s revenge but, also, as an attempt to offer an alternative to the Binding Myth.

Once there were green fields; or the death of the mythological Sabra As Assi Dayan well knows,12 any discussion of his oeuvre and/or persona begins with the part he played in the now canonical film, He Walked through the Fields, a role that in retrospect was to shape the figure of the mythological Sabra in Israeli collective memory. Adapted from Moshe Shamir’s 1947 novel, Millo’s 1967 cinematic version of He Walked through the Fields differs from its literary source in many aspects.13 Set in 1947, on the eve of the State of Israel’s independence, the film’s narrative recounts the dramatic events in the short life of Uri Kahana, the first child of his

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kibbutz, who joins the Jewish military underground in order to contribute to the fight for independence. He dies in an attempt to divert the British soldiers’ attention so as to enable Jewish Holocaust survivors to reach the land of Palestine. The plot, which takes place in the pre-State era in which the original book was written, was transformed and adapted in the film to the new national reality in the mid-1960s. At first sight it would seem that Millo’s slight changes in the plot were no more than some historical updating. The film added a framing narrative that takes place in the present and in which the heroic Uri’s son, also named Uri, whom he did not have a chance to know, comes to visit his grandfather in the kibbutz. However, a closer look at the film shows that times have dramatically changed and, in the mid-1960s, Trumpeldor’s apocryphal famous last words “It is good to die for our country,” are being contested by a generation, that, under the influence of European postwar culture, dares to prefer life over death. The concept of national martyrdom, inculcated by the Zionist founding fathers who could not think of a better way to link the younger generation to its new land, has lost its validity. Moreover, as a result of this ideological shift, the cinematic Uri aspires to live and achieve a personal (and maybe even bourgeois) life with his beloved Mika, even before Israel’s independence. Only the ideological pressure of his family (and, in this specific case, of his father’s dominant figure) and friends cause him to join the Palmach underground resistance and sacrifice his life in a sequence that has now become paradigmatic of Israeli cinema. At the heart of this sequence lies the one single frame shot that, in my opinion, encapsulates the entire drama of the Zionist blind adoption of the Binding Myth and inundates it.14 In this sequence, Uri finds his death in a dangerous mission intended to distract the British soldiers’ attention, and thereby enabling the smuggling in of illegal Jewish immigrants from Europe to Palestine. Director Millo chooses to convey this event in one single shot: the freeze frame on Uri’s final facial expression. This shot, capturing the moment of death, differs from the style of the rest of the film not only in its freeze frame but also in its over-exposed lighting that projects light onto Uri’s face as if to turn him into a saint. It thus creates the memorable image of Zionism’s elected son at the moment of his sacrifice on the altar of its ideology. The strength of this shot, in which an enigmatic expression is frozen on his face in the moment of his death, does not derive only from the narrative and style, but also from its symbolic value. The casting of the son of Israel’s most famous general for the part of Uri reinforces the national legacy of the Binding Myth. However, it was also to turn into one of the main riddles of

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the Israeli identity—the metamorphosis from the nation’s elected son to the sacrificed one. A hermeneutic reading reveals Millo’s canonic film as the prologue to Dayan’s trilogy, and may explain one of the latter’s interesting features: namely, its characters’ refusal to take part in the course of Israeli history in any referential mode. Except for the first film, Life according to Agfa which presents a conditional time indication (“In a year from now, if everything goes well”), the trilogy’s films bear no historical references. This absence of temporal reference is interesting because it manifests a conscious refusal to participate in the course of official recognizable Israeli history, as accurately defined in the motto of one of Dayan’s characters, Halvai (Levi) Bouskila: “There is no plan, we live, period.” At the same time, just like Life according to Agfa’ s motto, this absence of temporal reference highlights the fact that all the trilogy’s protagonists are dominated by the omnipresence of an undefined existential fear, apparently inherent to the Israeli place, being either the State of Israel or perhaps its most representative urban space, the city of Tel Aviv. In Dayan’s trilogy, neither national ethos nor history dictates his protagonists’ behavior in the present. Their only function is to echo the ancient Binding Myth. Therefore, when reproduced and, mainly, displaced in various and mostly inadequate contexts—such as the parodist songs of Agfa’s troubadour, or those of the vagabonds in An Electric Blanket Named Moshe, they confront the grandiosity of the past with the mediocrity of the present, and thus prove the irrelevance of the myth when extracted from its national context. The shattered memories of this glorious ethos is the reason the trilogy’s protagonists detach from their dynasty and their family and act, as if under hypnosis, in an attempt to perform the ultimate violent act—patricide. Whether as revenge for the first cinematic binding (Uri Kahana’s in He Walked through the Fields) or as a post-traumatic compulsive repetition of this initial sacrifice,15 all of Dayan’s recent feature films deal in one way or another with the death of the father, some being the result of a direct act of patricide. Life according to Agfa does not refer directly to a specific father but, rather, to a human situation that has deteriorated due to the absence of an organizing rule or principle (or a Lacanian nom-dupère) and now has to be razed to the ground in order to enable its rebuilding. An Electric Blanket Named Moshe takes its protagonists on a tour of Tel Aviv’s hospitals and cemeteries, where fathers are either dying or dead. And finally, Mr. Baum reenacts the narrative of the father’s death, a narrative so efficient that it serves as the philosophical foundation for Dayan’s most recent feature,

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Dr. Pomerantz (2011), a film that, as mentioned above, is considered by the filmmaker as a sequel to the trilogy. The three films together create a gradual movement from the general collective memory to a more specific, personal one: Agfa represented a sort of collective tragic destiny of the director’s peers in the decadent city of Tel Aviv; An Electric Blanket Named Moshe, was still set in Tel Aviv but in a more specific site—the Tel Aviv sea shore, an inter-textual reference to one of the most famous layabouts in Israeli cinema, Uri Zohar—and focused on the adventures of Agfa’s three outsiders, Levi, Moshe, and Malka. And finally, Mr. Baum, the most personal film of the trilogy, limited itself to the succession of events that preceded the death of a father, Micky Baum. The result of this focusing process inside the trilogy— from the more general to the most personal—is that the mythological Sabra that came into being in He Walked through the Fields finds himself contemplating his end, which, in fact, is not only his own but, mainly, the end of a national dream that has turned into a nightmare.

Life According to Agfa; or the simulation of an organizing principle for a chaotic Israeli life Immediately after its release in 1993, the first part of Dayan’s trilogy, Life according to Agfa, became a cultural event in the Israeli public sphere. Whether it was because of its futuristic motto “In a year from now, if everything goes well,” or because of its depiction of Tel Aviv’s decadent night life, a theme that became popular at the beginning of this same decade, in films such as Shuroo (Savi Gavison, 1991) or The Cage (Amit Goren, 1991), the film brought to the Israeli audience an apocalyptic vision that coincided with their impossibility of envisaging a way out of the socio-political impasse into which Israel had sunk at the time.16 Mostly shot in stylized and expressive black and white, Life according to Agfa depicted 24 hours in the life of the customers of a trendy Tel Aviv café/ bar called Barbie (named after the ironic moniker of the Israeli psychiatric hospital Abarbanel), from the early preparations involving the illegal Palestinian workers who prepare the kitchen for the evening guests, till the ultimate carnage the morning after, from which no one will survive. Between these two events, Dayan depicts a sinking world through brief encounters between representatives of all sectors of Israeli society: the above-mentioned Palestinian workers, Israeli army officers just returned back from an “operation” in Gaza, a secret-service

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Israeli agent, two Oriental (Mizrahi) Jewish men and their friend—a Rumanian woman prostitute, a young woman who has just arrived in Tel Aviv from her native kibbutz, a philosophical troubadour who translates the surrounding reality into songs, a young woman photographer whose project is to document Tel Aviv’s decadent night life—all of them acting under the melancholic gaze of the bar’s owner (actress Gila Almagor), who watches the events from the disabused viewpoint of one who has already seen everything, but in fact hides her secret anxiety regarding her married lover’s fragile health. The familiarity among the characters suggests that most of them are acquainted and that, for them, this is just one more night of alcohol and despair. This night, however, is different, as it ends in a terrible violent massacre. First come the soldiers who were insulted by the condescending behavior of the bar’s regular customers and begin shooting at every one. In the middle of the shooting the Mizrahim arrive with the same intention. One by one all of the characters that populated the bar fall one upon another. The last ones to be killed being Dalia, the bar owner, who falls on an anonymous UN soldier in whose arms she thought she could find comfort and Samir, the Arab cook, who is shot against the wall and falls down in a symbolical Christ-like position, with his hands spread aside. This violent sequence is presented in a long slow motion shot, accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s song “Who by Fire” still playing in the background.17 The song’s lyrics and the on-screen events seem to complete each other and create an apocalyptic vision of the decadent city of Tel Aviv. At the end of this violent scene, a last shot is fired at the tape recorder and Cohen’s song ends as well. The last sequence that comes right after the black and white carnage scene is shot in color. Now everything is different: the high-angle color shots reveal the blue sky above the empty streets. The camera enters a room through a balcony and reveals the black and white photographs shot during the previous night. The spectator now hesitates as to the interpretation of the black-and-white part of the narrative. Was it no more than a nightmare, whereas the final sequence in color represents the awakening? Was it supposed to represent the possible outcome of the present national dead end reality (the early 1990s)? Or should it be read as a variation on the Binding Myth that this time would include all generations and, in this way, hint at the suicidal potential of the country? It seems that, as opposed to many other filmmakers in the Israeli cinema of the 1990s, who chose to detach themselves from the national founding Binding Myth and opt for the value system of their diaspora,18 Dayan has chosen to

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refer to the myth but from a different angle, as Agfa shows blind killing that does not differentiate between fathers and sons, between the young and the old, between Jews and Moslems. According to Agfa, the Binding Myth, one of the country’s existential values, has lost its particularity, as Israel has become an unpredictable and bloodthirsty place. The fathers, those who traditionally should support the binding, seem to have lost control of the situation and in fact have no representation in the film’s carnage scene. Moreover, by revealing the fatalistic trajectory of those who, like, the mythological Sabra, came from the sea and forgot their past,19 Dayan’s futuristic fantasy shows these Sabras are doomed to die in a godless empty world. The film’s title, “Life according to Agfa,” hinted at the possibility that the celluloid, or by extrapolation, the mimesis of life, could provide an alternative organizing principle distanced from the Israeli collective memory. But the film’s color ending on the empty streets of Tel Aviv is in fact the admission of the failure of this attempt. Dayan’s nihilist vision of the near future tells more than anything about Israel’s terrible present, (and one should remember that the film was shot during the last days of the first Intifada) and that this nightmarish present could reach its end only at the price of a collective sacrifice.20

Patricide as salvation: An Electric Blanket Named Moshe Directly connected to Agfa’s final, perhaps awakening, sequence, the second part of Dayan’s trilogy opens with a dream. Moshe, the Mizrahi homeless man, who was already introduced in Agfa, is now seen walking along in a Tel Aviv street. He comes across a fellow pedestrian and points his gun at him, but the pedestrian does not seem to be scared at all. Moshe, who seems desperate, suddenly awakens on a sunny day in the middle of a public garden, relieved by the fact that it had been just another nightmare. The three protagonists of An Electric Blanket Named Moshe—the Mizrahi Jews Levi (Halevai) Bouskila and Moshe and the Rumanian prostitute Malka— already appeared in Agfa,21 where they had tried to regain part of their lost honor (as Mizrahi Jews and as part of the underworld) and were killed with the other café inhabitants in the final apocalyptic sequence. Now they wander aimlessly in the streets of Tel Aviv, waiting for something to happen. Each of the three has a specific fantasy. Moshe dreams of possessing a belt (symbol of manhood) and an electric blanket (symbolizing home), two items through which he could

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constitute himself as a legitimate son of the nation, but at the same time knows that he will probably never get them and never reach this status. Malka, the prostitute, dreams of marrying Levi and having a child with him. But her dream is incompatible with Levi’s recurring dreams about his own death. Waiting for a miracle that would make all their dreams come true, the three try to earn money by arranging “missions” for Malka, the prostitute. In the middle of the narrative, after a violent encounter with some underworld figures, they reach the emergency room. This hyper-realistic hospital sequence, reminiscent of a hectic nightmare, allows them to familiarize themselves with death, especially when they encounter a medical doctor who has been working for 36 hours and does not understand why modern medicine seeks to prolong old people’s lives. In a long monologue, delivered as he walks among supine patients, he disconnects an old man’s monitor and mentions, in passing, that this was his father. The sequence ends with the old man seen lying lifeless on his deathbed. This only literal instance of patricide in the trilogy can be interpreted according to the reading offered in this chapter as its core and can be understood as referring to the collective memory of the Binding Myth, as it expresses the son’s wish to take revenge for the always threatening sacrifice. But the dreams about inverting the myth structure do not stop here. After their visit to the emergency room, the three homeless friends continue to walk in the streets of Tel Aviv, still waiting for something to happen. But nothing has changed and Levi repeats his motto: “There is no plan. We live. Period.” When, finally, at the end of the film, he dares to share Malka’s romantic dream and envisages the two of them walking together along the sea shore, the filmmaker visually recreates the impossibility of this situation, using a back screening of a sunrise over the sea shore (whereas the actual situation in Israel is that of the sun setting over the sea, i.e. in the west). This fantasy echoes another dream, the dream that Levi dares to express aloud, after confronting his own father and requesting his father’s death, since only then, after losing his father, he will himself be able to become a father. In this dream he will have a son and name him Osher (Hebrew for happiness); he will buy him a leather jacket and make him a lawyer; and when the son will finally become a judge, he will judge his father and sentence him to jail. Levi’s dream of redemption epitomizes the entire problematic of the father–son relationship in Dayan’s oeuvre. Just like Barthes’s contention regarding the interdependence of father and son in Racine’s tragedies,22 Levi’s dream reveals an ambiguous attitude typical to Dayan’s oeuvre, an attitude in which the relationship between

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father and son, oscillates back and forth from love and care to punishment and revenge. The absence of rules in Levi’s chaotic world generates his longing for a strict penal code through which he will finally get to learn all that the nation did not require from him since he was a Mizrahi, the “Other of order,” this “miasma of the indeterminate and the unpredictable, [. . .] the uncertainty, that source and archetype of all fear.”23 But, An Electric Blanket Named Moshe is set in a chaotic world, a world that has been deserted by the representatives of the nation’s social order, a fact that reinforces the three protagonists’ status as pariahs, the unrecognized sons of the nation. However, as will be discussed further on in this article, their reappearance in the final sequence of Mr. Baum will reveal that, according to Dayan’s apocalyptic vision, these pariahs will be the nation’s ultimate survivors.

The chosen son’s death: Mr. Baum In spite of its fragmented narrative and its generally surrealistic appearances, the last part of Dayan’s trilogy, Mr. Baum, is certainly the most complete and most coherent part of Dayan’s thesis of the father-and-son tragedy. The recurring motif of the father’s death that was present all through the trilogy is now reenacted in its entirety. The father’s predestinated death has become the film’s subject matter as well as the narrative prism through which Dayan revisits the Binding Myth, that same myth which was so crucial in Zionist ideology and that, ironically, became the main threat to the New Jew’s existence. Dayan does not content himself, however, with revisiting the myth: he creates a new version of it, in which the myth fails in its very mythical function. The third part of Dayan’s trilogy explicitly retraces the narrative of a father’s death. It opens with the protagonist (played by director Assi Dayan) undergoing a regular medical check-up. His doctor (actor Gil Alon, whom the spectator has already met in the trilogy’s previous part as the ER doctor putting an end to his father’s life), informs him that he suffers from an aggressive brain tumor, and that he is about to die soon, “very soon, actually within 90 to 92 minutes.”24 This information forces him to make some last arrangements before he leaves this world and, mostly, to reexamine his life. Baum, who lives in the post-ideological era of Israel’s fin de siècle, begins a race against time in an attempt to close all the open ends of his personal life and solve all of the unfinished business in it.

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It turns out that Mr. Baum is a very typical,25 anonymous Israeli father: an average upper-middle-class Israeli, an Ashkenazi businessman who owns a company that imports sunglasses from Japan, lives in Tel Aviv with his wife, a television producer, and his two children—his son who is a soldier and his teenage daughter. Like many Israelis of his age and social class, he is involved in minor tax evasion and fantasizes about sex and romance. After several insignificant meetings with people who may have played a role in his life, Mr. Baum dies lying alone in his bedroom, after bursting into tears in the shower. A funeral procession, which he has been imagining throughout the last moments of his life, ends, and the grave is abandoned. At this moment the trilogy’s vagabonds, Levi and Moshe, reappear, this time in the cemetery, hoping to find some food at the funeral; but there is no one left and they begin arguing with one another about what could have happened to the person who died. “Maybe he walked through the fields” suggests Levi, and adds a line of his own “Ana Aref ” (in Arabic and Hebrew slang, “what do I know”). Through the vulgarization and banalization of this founding myth of Israeli culture, this last sentence reduces the pathos of the original quotation and achieves a closure in Dayan’s trajectory, from his first cinematic role as the mythological Sabra to his (almost) last one, as the lonely, aging Sabra. In addition to the narrative of Mr. Baum’s last hours, the film follows with bitter irony the canonization process of this insignificant man. Throughout the narrative, Dayan introduces intercuts from a museum exhibition in honor/ memory of Mr. Baum, an exhibition that would follow the signs of his empty life and seek to give it some meaning. Trivial elements from his final day are now read and interpreted aloud by the late famous Israeli art critic Adam Baruch (playing himself), in which he demonstrates the trajectory of Mr. Baum as a collection of cultural artifacts that have lost their reference to reality, one of them being the famous shot of Dayan himself in He Walked through the Fields. In this way, the man, who was insignificant in his life, is suddenly given the opportunity to become someone in his death. These artifacts, however, become meaningful only by their negation. “Micky did not come from the sea; Micky does not walk through the fields; Micky will not arrive tomorrow; Micky’s dead,”26 concludes the exhibition curator. This is why there is nothing sad about Mr. Baum’s death. Dayan’s postmodern inscription of the insignificant Mr. Baum’s life and death in the national collective memory, that is, its seeking to turn the banal into the sublime through musealization, demonstrates in fact nothing but a reaffirmation of the failure of the mythological Sabra myth.

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Dr. Pomerantz: “There is no plan, we live, period” This consistent demystification of the Sabra’ s mythological figure is finally revisited in Dayan’s most recent film, Dr. Pomerantz (2011), at first sight another black comedy that in fact continues to elaborate on the trope of the father-and-son tragedy. Just like the previous three parts of the trilogy, it deals with death. This time, however, death takes another configuration: it is no longer the father’s death or the father’s assassination but, rather, the random killing of exhausted Israeli individuals who cannot find a plausible reason for their lives. The protagonist is Dr. Pomerantz (again played by Assi Dayan), a tired psychiatrist who, following his wife’s suicide many years ago, is left in his large Tel Aviv apartment with his 30-year-old, only son who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome and works as a traffic inspector who enjoys affixing traffic tickets to car windshields. Owing to financial reasons, Pomerantz finds himself collaborating with a (fictive) psychiatric service, in the spirit of our times, the Express Psychological Assistance (in its Hebrew initials ENE), where he specializes in preventing suicide. When he is fired following an unfortunate incident with the ENE, he discovers an original way to make a living: renting out his balcony on the twelfth floor of a Tel Aviv apartment building to his depressed patients so that they could successfully commit suicide. Described by one Israeli critique as “funny, touching and horrifying,”27 the film expresses empathy for this aging Israeli psychologist, who no longer believes in the ability of his profession to help its patients recover from their ever-growing local pathologies.28 It also presents a new kind of dialogue between father and son, one in which the father cares for his son but this son is so detached from reality, due to his Asperger’s syndrome, that he ignores his father’s expectations and/or death wishes. This seems to represent Dayan’s ultimate correction of the terrible, always threatening, Binding Myth. The Asperger’s-afflicted son will never become either a threat to his father or a worthy sacrifice for the nation. His disability actually protects him from the tragic destiny of the Zionist ideology’s son and enables him to live side by side with his father, outside the course of history, in a continuous present. In Dr. Pomerantz, Dayan demonstrates how, through a nonconventional mode of functioning, in which the father takes care of his son’s immediate needs and his son simply lives a carefree existence, the family’s normative patterns provide the illusion of being restored. In this dysfunctional existential mode, Dayan expresses his ultimate fantasy, one in which the dynasty reaches its end

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not through the son’s ideological binding and its traumatic implications for father and son alike, but through the passive inversions of the roles. The father understands that his son’s condition leaves him in a functional and intellectual immobility and therefore decides to give up and following his patients’ suicide, throws himself from his balcony. It seems that Dayan’s long-lasting quest for a plausible answer to the curse of the Binding Myth finds an answer here, or at least, is offered for the first time an alternative according to which the father is no longer the sole owner of his son’s life and therefore will not decide his life or death. Pomerantz’s suicide should be regarded as director Dayan’s completion of a journey into the heart of ideological darkness.

Conclusion: Awakening from a nightmare? Assi Dayan’s cinematic journey has not yet ended but one can already recognize the major outline of his oeuvre’s master-narrative, characterized by a tragic irony, often touching upon necrophilia, and particularly by the recurring theme of the father-and-son tragedy. Dayan, who grew up alongside the realization of the Zionist dream of a nation, whose body and being inadvertently became part of the nation’s collective memory,29 experienced very early in his career, through his first cinematic role, the sacrifice of Zionism’s elected son on the altar of ideology. Since then he has turned back to the myth in order to invert its narrative and inscribe its failure as an alternative. In the transformed version of the myth he created, sons are no longer sacrificed by their fathers in the name of some high ideal, but rather take revenge, transforming the father’s death into a powerful spectacle or at least, staging one possible vision of the end, with one such version being recalled on the radio broadcast with which I began this article. As opposed to the Binding Myth that reinforced the alliance between man and God or, in its secular ideological version, between man and nation, the father’s death reveals the chaos, and thus symbolizes the absence of ruling principles in the national space. This vision of the end (of the protagonists’ consciousness or of the nation’s existence) also reflects the end of a dream, as this dream has become a nightmare from which the hero and/or the nation have to awaken. “There is no plan. We live. Period,” says Levi Bouskila, one of the trilogy’s two vagabond protagonists. In its self-destructive standpoint, abolishing any possible future, Dayan’s four-part trilogy challenges the nation’s collective memory and seems

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to reach a position echoing Slavoj Žižek’s apocalyptic words to the Occupy Wall Street Demonstration on October 2011: “We’re not dreamers. We’re awaking from a dream turning into a nightmare. We’re not destroying anything. We’re watching the system destroy itself.”30

Notes I would like to thank this anthology’s editors and reviewers for their helpful comments. 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9 10

11 12

I would like to thank Ms. Dana Massad for her valuable suggestion on this issue. Also known as The 92 Minutes of Mr. Baum. Uri Klein, “Dr. Dayan and Mr. Assi,” Haaretz [in Hebrew], February 17, 2012. Yael Zerubavel, “The ‘Mythological Sabra’ and Jewish Past: Trauma, Memory, and Contested Identities,” Israel Studies 7, no. 2 (2002): 116. Anat Zanger, “Hole in the Moon or Zionism and the Binding (Ha-Ak’eda) Myth in Israeli Cinema,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22, no. 1 (2003): 95–109. Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 4. Assi Dayan, “The Country and Me,” Yediyot Aharonot [in Hebrew], June 5, 2008. Feldman investigates the implications of this religious myth’s adoption at the moment the Israeli nation was born. Yael S. Feldman, Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and the National Narrative (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). Feldman, Glory and Agony, 73. Anat Zanger contends that the 1960s personal Israeli cinema tried to resist the mythological determinism by adapting it to its changing circumstances, a modification that led to what she identifies as “the demythologization of binding” in the 1960s and 1970s and to a “protest against binding as a metaphor for existence” in the 1980s and 1990s (Zanger, “Hole in the Moon”). Although this change of attitude toward the binding seems similar to Assi Dayan’s in his trilogy, it differs from it in the fact that Dayan does not mean to protest but, rather, enables his characters to act, sometimes metaphorically, against the myth. Adam Baruch, quoted in Feldman, Glory and Agony, 107. In his latest interview with Assi Dayan, film critic Uri Klein reports that Dayan is “tired of the fact that no matter what part he plays, people revive Uri Kahana, his character in He Walked through the Fields, the 1967 film that made him a star, and claim that Dayan is once again demonstrating what happened to the handsome and heroic young Sabra—he has become an importer of sunglasses,

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Deeper than Oblivion as in Mr. Baum. He doesn’t think about this and it doesn’t interest him” (Klein, “Dr. Dayan and Mr. Assi”). The differences between the novel and the film are analyzed in depth in Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Literature and Cinema [in Hebrew] (Ramat Aviv: The Open University, 1993). One of the main differences lies in the motivations for Uri’s death. In the novel, his death does not take place during a military operation but rather during an exercise, when one of the less experienced soldiers throws a bomb in the wrong direction and endangers the entire military unit. However, for unclear reasons, Uri decides to throw himself on the bomb, a choice that can be interpreted as an act of bravery or, if the reader relies on the hesitative and melancholic moments that were spread all through the novel, as the inevitable outcome of his inability to choose. In this case, his seemingly heroic act should be read as a suicide. Millo’s film seems to be clearer on the subject but still keeps a measure of ambivalence that now fits into the scheme of the new Israeli personal cinema in the 1960s. The term “inundation” suggests a technique of reading texts that allows the critic to add silenced knowledge—historical and theoretical—hence complicating any reductive reading of the texts. It transforms the text from a site of arrival to a point of departure. See Masood Ashraf Raja, “Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial Texts in the Era of Empire,” Postcolonial Text 5, no. 2 (2009). This article offers, in my opinion, the best definition of the inundation technique in textual interpretation. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, Vol. 18, (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955), 1–64. Actress Irit Frank, who played the café photographer, confirms this feeling in an interview: “We were sure the film was saying to everyone: ‘Be careful, we are in a very bad state.’ It was this point in time in Israeli reality where it seemed like the end of the world was near, and we had come to warn people. We were sure we were headed for the end of the state that a terrible disaster was looming; we felt we were doing something that went beyond a film.” (Nirit Anderman, “‘Agfa’ according to Those who Lived It,” Haaretz, December 23, 2011). Leonard Cohen’s song, “Who by Fire,” uses the words of the Yom Kippur prayer “Natane Tokef ”: “Who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by upheaval, who by plague, who by strangling, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will

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21

22

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suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted”. Cohen inscribed some modifications in the original text: “And who by fire,/who by water,/Who in the sunshine, who in the night time,/Who by high ordeal, who by common trial,/Who in your merry merry month of may,/ Who by very slow decay, /And who shall I say is calling? /And who in her lonely slip, who by barbiturate,/Who in these realms of love, who by something blunt,/ And who by avalanche, who by powder, Who for his greed, who for his hunger”.But the spirit remains the same: only God can decide about life and death. Yael Munk, Exiled in Their Borders: Israeli Cinema at the Turn of the Century [in Hebrew] (Raanana: Open University Press, forthcoming). Moshe Shamir, With His Own Hands [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1951). The analogy is, of course, to the haunting Jewish myth of Masada there the Zealots decided on a collective suicide in order to prevent their captivity. In her book Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of National Tradition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), Yael Zerubavel points at the ideological uses of the Masada story in the modern State of Israel, as an analogy to the final stand from which no one dare retreat and for which all its citizens must be willing to sacrifice. In Nurit Anderman’s article on the production of Life according to Agfa, actor Shmil Ben Ari recalls the way their outsider characters came into being: “The three of us, Rivka and Uri [Klausner] and I showed Assi what we were thinking of doing, and he told us, ‘Excellent, excellent.’ We rehearsed for a few minutes, shot it, and that was it. That’s to Assi’s credit, because he always knew what he wanted. [. . .] He was very pleased and said, ‘I’m going to write a screenplay about the three of you.’ We said, ‘Yeah, fine’—we thought he was talking from enthusiasm, but then, half a year later, Kislev telephoned us, ‘Come, pick up a script.’ I couldn’t believe it. I came to his office, I took a script and cracked up laughing. Assi had promised, and he delivered.” And indeed, the characters played by Ben Ari, Klausner and Neuman in Agfa became the protagonists of Dayan’s next film, An Electric Blanket Named Moshe.” (“‘Agfa’ according to Those who Lived It.”) Roland Barthes suggests that an ambiguous, unnatural relationship between fathers and sons lies at the heart of seventeenth-century French playwright Jean Racine’s classical plays, in which he perceives father-and-son relationships as doomed to a dead end, “an immediate relation, which is denied escape, transcendence, forgiveness, and even victory” (Roland Barthes, On Racine, trans. Richard Howard [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992], 40). The father sees himself as “the unconditional owner of the son’s life” and the son as “torn till death between his fear of the father and his need to destroy him” (20–1). Barthes thereby describes the

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25

26

27 28

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Deeper than Oblivion structural essence of this tragedy as one in which both sides are fully aware of their dreadful part in it, and neither of them is able to withdraw or change the rules. Zigmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 26. This precise time indication refers first and foremost to cinematic time, as the average Hollywood feature film runs to between 90 and 95 minutes. See James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History and Theory of Film and Media (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 202. It is no coincidence that Dayan’s hero is named Baum (in German: a tree). As a typical Israeli he bears the traces of a nation that believed that, as a famous Israeli poet put it, “Man is nothing but his Native Landscape Pattern.” Though the tree refers to the land, a motive that was central in the Zionist ethos, the name is foreign, and more precisely, German. These three phrases refer to three canonical Zionist literary texts: He Walked through the Fields (1947) and With His Own Hands (1951), both written by Moshe Shamir, and Nathan Shaham’s play They’ll Arrive Tomorrow (1947). Klein, “Dr. Dayan and Mr. Assi.” In recent years, one of Dayan’s most important roles was that of a psychologist, Reuven Dagan, in the television series In Treatment. The series that was telecast for two seasons (2005 and 2008) was later adapted for the US market by HBO, which also called it In Treatment, with Gabriel Byrne in the lead role. In his “The Country and Me,” Dayan himself refers to his body as a bearer of the entire Zionism symbolism and contends that his growing old flesh has to be regarded as a symbol of the country’s deterioration. I expressed a similar notion earlier, in my article on Mr. Baum. See Yael Munk, “Following Mr. Baum’s Naked Body,” Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew] 18 (2001): 193–97. Sarah Shin, “Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street,” Verso Books Blog, www.versobooks. com/blogs/736-slavoj-zizek-at-occupy-wall-street-we-are-not-dreamers-weare-the-awakening-from-a-dream-which-is-turning-into-a-nightmare.

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. On Racine. Translated by Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Bauman, Zigmunt. Modernity and Ambivalence. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991. Feldman, Yael S. Glory and Agony: Isaac’s Sacrifice and the National Narrative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Edited and translated by James

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Strachey. Vol. 18, (1920–1922): Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 1–64. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1955. Gertz, Nurith. Motion Fiction: Literature and Cinema [in Hebrew]. Ramat Aviv: The Open University, 1993. Irwin-Zarecka, Iwona. Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994. Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language, History and Theory of Film and Media. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Munk, Yael. Exiled in Their Borders: Israeli Cinema at the Turn of the Century [in Hebrew]. Raanana: Open University Press, forthcoming. —. “Following Mr. Baum’s Naked Body.” Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew] 18 (2001): 193–97. Raja, Masood Ashraf. “Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial Texts in the Era of Empire.” Postcolonial Text 5, no. 2 (2009). Shamir, Moshe. With His Own Hands [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1951. Zanger, Anat. “Hole in the Moon or Zionism and the Binding (Ha-Ak’eda) Myth in Israeli Cinema.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22, no. 1 (2003): 95–109. Zerubavel, Yael. “The ‘Mythological Sabra’ and Jewish Past: Trauma, Memory, and Contested Identities.” Israel Studies 7, no. 2 (2002): 115–44. —. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of National Tradition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

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8

Queering Terror: Trauma, Race, and Nationalism in Palestinian and Israeli Gay Cinema during the Second Intifada Raya Morag

An analysis of Israeli and Palestinian second Intifada films depicting the relation between race, gender, and gay and lesbian sexuality (2001–8) reveals the complexity of the epistemology of queering interwoven with the post-trauma of occupation and terror. Gay and (to a lesser degree) lesbian cinema has existed for decades in Israel and since the 1980s has also dealt with interracial sex between men.1 Palestinian cinema, on the other hand, caught in the paradox of being both national and stateless, is still struggling with issues of self-definition, national identity, and space.2 It would seem that in its attempts to rearticulate the Palestinian blocked space as part of laying down the foundation for a national narrative, Palestinian cinema has not yet begun to deal with the body in the context of sexual identity and interracial sex, whether homo- or heterosexual. Tawfik Abu-Wael’s prize-winning short film about interracial male-male relations, Diary of a Male Whore (2001)3 can be considered a breakthrough. His venture into this social taboo is striking not only against the backdrop of the present state of Palestinian cinema, but also against developments in contemporary world and Islamic pan-Arab cinema.4 This chapter will compare Abu-Wael’s film with two Israeli films: The Bubble (2006) by Eytan Fox, a leading gay director, and Gevald (2009), an acclaimed queer-lesbian short film by the female director Netalie Braun, and will discuss the complex ways these films illuminate the relationship between queer epistemology based on Israeli Occupation’s body-space tensions and suicide terror. In Diary, while servicing an Israeli client, a Palestinian street hustler recalls his violent childhood—culminating with the memory of his mother’s

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rape by an Israeli soldier. Bubble presents a love affair between two young men, an Israeli and a Palestinian, which ends tragically when the Palestinian becomes a suicide terrorist and detonates himself together with his lover. Gevald depicts a reunion between two Israeli lesbians in a gay bar where a drag-king show between a terrorist and his lover is being performed by Palestinian lesbians prior to an explosion in the bar. That is, while Palestinian cinema places interracial sex within the reality of the post-traumatic memory of expulsion and loss of home, Israeli cinema places it within the Western urban reality of a gay and lesbian community caught up in terrorism. I contend that whereas Diary assumes responsibility over the traumatic past by examining violence within Palestinian society as well as that inflicted by Israel, tragically reenacting the devastating consequences of the Occupation, Bubble assumes no such responsibility. Its attempt to “embrace” the Palestinian gay other involves ongoing denial of the Occupation and projection of its own violence onto the other’s subjectivity. Gevald, like Diary, presents both Jewish and Moslem violence. Its recognition, however, of the extreme otherness of the Palestinian other, the terrorist, is ambiguous: present only through a performance, its declared openness is finally shattered by the explosion. The marked contrast between the Israeli and the Palestinian films immediately brings to light the central issues that will be discussed here: How do the films represent the connection between sexual and ethnic repression and the traumatic histories of occupation and terror? What are the historical-political linkages between the Israeli occupation, based on subjugation and surveillance, and the pathologizing of sexuality? Do interracial relationships, founded on multiple border-crossings, reproduce the social pathology of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle? Can the post-traumatic fantasy that characterizes these films serve as a force behind at least a cinematic reconciliation? This chapter offers a close textual analysis as the preferred way to delve into these intimate post-traumatic queer epistemologies.

Diary of a Male Whore—hustling and the unending occupation The plot is revealed through the voice-over of Essam (Tahir Mahamid), a young Palestinian from a refugee family, illegally residing in Tel Aviv and earning his living as a street hustler. The entire film is bracketed by a car scenario, in which

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he masturbates in front of an elderly Israeli client and recalls scenes from his youth. The beginning of the flashback depicts the outset of his sexual maturity in an Arab village before it was conquered by the Israeli army: committing sodomy with a sheep, listening to his parents have sexual relations, and secretly watching a village girl, Asya (Ruth Bernstein), as she bathes in a spring. His memories date from when the village was first occupied, his father’s murder, and the rape of his mother. The film ends as Essam receives his payment and continues to walk the dark Tel Aviv streets. Diary depicts the traumatic events reenacted in the flashbacks as historically ambiguous. The imprecise timeframe indicates that the film proposes to describe the everlasting character of the Israeli occupation, beginning from the Nakba and continuing through the 1967 conquest and the Intifada; in particular, it seeks to portray the trauma of the Nakba as an intergenerational burden. Taking into consideration Essam’s age during the flashback (12 or 13), whether the flashback reenacts events during the Nakba or the 1967 conquest, it would be impossible for him to be a young man residing illegally in Tel Aviv during either the first or second Intifadas. As a result, the tension between the Nakba, the Israeli Occupation, and the Intifada; between past, present, and eternal time; magnifies the tension between fantasy and trauma that stands at the core of the film. Diary places interracial male-male sex between the Palestinian hustler and his Israeli client within a narrative structure in which the post-traumatic memory of the Nakba/the Occupation, structured through flashbacks, accounts for the character of interracial relations (anonymous one-time sexual meetings, paid masturbation/voyeurism). In other words, in the present, Essam’s sexuality is depicted as post-traumatic. The first clue to causal relationships between past and present is presented in an incident with a prostitute that opens the film and is a portent to the scene in which Essam himself becomes a prostitute. In the first scene, against the backdrop of noir photography of nighttime Tel Aviv (cars, people in cafés), his voice-over is heard: “The sheep and the hen were my first females. I first slept with a woman the day I arrived in Tel Aviv. My late friend, Abu-Krah, and I got drunk and we looked for a prostitute. I went in first. ‘How was she?’ ‘She has no teeth.’ ‘No teeth?’ he yelled. I answered, ‘The mouth between her legs has no teeth.’” According to Barbara Creed, “The myth about woman as castrator clearly points to male fears and phantasies about the female genitals as a trap, a black hole which threatens to swallow them up and cut them into pieces. The vagina dentata is the mouth of hell – a terrifying symbol of woman as the ‘devil’s gateway.’ ”5

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The fear of the vagina dentata is already visually hinted at in the beginning of the film with a close-up of the prominent teeth of an Israeli woman sitting in a café. The editing cuts sharply between the prostitute incident, with its high level of anxiety, to the present: the client and reenactment of traumatic childhood memories. When Essam enters the Israeli client’s car and the act of prostitution and memory process begin simultaneously, the editing uses flashbacks to tie together the two traumatic audial voyeuristic events that took place earlier in Essam’s youth: listening to his parents have intercourse (the primal scene fantasy) and his mother’s rape (see Figure 8.1). According to Kaja Silverman, the moment of infantile voyeurism signifies “the point of entry for an alien and traumatic sexuality.”6 The child-spectator is unable to decipher what he sees and, therefore, “The spectacle assumes its full force only later, after it has been internalized as representation.”7 The outcome is a complex dramatization of temporality, since the primal scene which “occurs not so much in ‘reality’ as in fantasy . . . is a construction after the fact . . . it is either constituted through a deferred action . . . or constructed as a fantasy on the basis of some remembered detail.”8 Being overwhelmed by the sounds and images of parental sexuality, the outcome—as Freud notes—is a profound disruption of the “conventional” masculinity of the onlooker. Diary confers a new meaning on Silverman’s paradigm of the look regarding the primal scene: it is not “either too early or too late,” as she defines the child’s experience with

Figure 8.1 Flashback to childhood voyeurism, Essam in Diary of a Male Whore. Courtesy of Tawfik Abu-Wael.

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respect to sexuality. But, because of the extended primal scene—that is, the audial connection between being a deferred voyeur to his parents and a voyeur to the rape—the spectating child undergoes the “too early” as well as the “too late.” As the incident with the Israeli prostitute demonstrates, the primal scenes in Diary, revealed to be traumatic only much later, post-factum as it were, through their effect, had the shattering effect of being both “too early” and “too late” because of the Nakba; and so, predetermined Essam’s sexual behavior as post-traumatic. In other words, Essam’s fear of vagina dentata (and his prostitution) is presented as resulting from his exposure to the primal scene, the absence of a father figure, and his consequent over-attachment to his mother during childhood. Of course, when speaking of the dyadic mother, the projection of the image of the mouth to her genitalia is linked to oral pleasure.9 Nevertheless, the fantasy of the dyadic mother that symbolically incorporates him ascribes the castrating position to her: “The image of the toothed vagina, symbolic of the all-devouring woman, is related to the subject’s infantile memories of its early relation with the mother and the subsequent fear of its identity being swallowed up by the mother.”10 According to Creed, and contrary to Freud,11 it can be argued that the genitalia of the mother that were depicted in the voyeuristic fantasy are unconsciously perceived by Essam as castrating, and not as castrated. If so, the racialization of the primal scene acts retroactively: during Essam’s first sexual experience with a woman as an adult the vagina dentata, which characterized his mother in his imagination, is projected on the Israeli prostitute.12 The question is, why didn’t Essam’s voyeuristic witnessing of the rape of his mother change the fantasy of vagina dentata? That is, why was she not transformed from castrating to castrated in his imagination? I suggest that racialization generates transformation that transcends the text: During the first audial incident, Essam presents himself as innocent and describes his voyeurism as naivety; during the second incident, the Israeli conquest and the rape, Essam fantasizes/remembers himself as a passive voyeur, almost a collaborator. He does not answer his mother’s calls, but hides. The editing uses cross-cutting to show Essam sitting in silence while she cries to him for help.13 As the narrative shows, Essam’s inevitable guilt feelings “froze” his (unconscious) perception of his mother before the rape in his imagination. The trauma of the rape and especially his guilt preserves the castrating mother in his “sexual memory.” If so, the survivor guilt he suffers expands his fantasy of the mother in the primal scene to his perception of her during the rape, so that

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her fantasmatic “status” remains unchanged. The result is projection of vagina dentata onto the Israeli prostitute, and hustling. By ascribing Essam’s interracial sexual relations, and especially his hustling, to his past-traumatic experiences, the film, of course, severely criticizes the destructive consequences of the Israeli Occupation (from the Nakba to the second Intifada) on Palestinian society and masculinity. Still, one of the most subversive aspects of Abu-Wael’s oeuvre is that he combines criticism of Israeli society with criticism of Palestinian; moreover, he points out the interdependence of Palestinian and Israeli violence. The brutal relations existing between the father and other family members within Abu-Wael’s Palestinian cinematic families are reflected in Israeli violence. The violence wreaked by the Israeli soldier on Essam’s mother in Diary echoes his father’s violence toward her—both physically and as imagined by Essam in his primal scene fantasy. In Diary, Essam confesses that he did not mourn his father’s murder because as a child he had been a target of his brutality. In this sense, the constant textual tension between traumatic fantasy and memory creates the (unseen) murder of the father as a fantasmatic unconscious realization and not only as an actual event. The double function of the flashback as both real memory and fantasy is intensified by its scenic quality (including the transition from the darkness of the car to the brightness of childhood scenes, and from the closed space of masturbation to an open one filled with participants and action). For Freud, the term fantasy, as many have claimed, is bound to a scenic quality. Similarly, Silverman argues that “unconscious desire generally assumes the form of a visual tableau or narrateme”;14 Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis also name the fantasmatic “a mise-en-scène of desire.”15 In Fantasme Originaire, they further expand their discussion about fantasy as dramatization in which the subject plays a role.16 Their analysis of primal fantasies (“Urphantasien”) according to Freud, emphasizes that these fantasies—dealing with the origins of subjectivity, of sexuality, and of sex differences—are scenic.17 Essam uses memory to direct his primal fantasmatic scenes so that the dramatis personae of childhood is projected, as Laplanche and Pontalis18 claim, on those participating in real scenes in the present. This dramatization containing a sequence of images from the past that leaves its mark on the roles played in the present is based on interchanging post-traumatic subject positioning. As a post-traumatic subject, Essam positions himself in the “time of auto-eroticism,” as Laplanche and Pontalis suggest. The result is two contradictory subject positions: in the rape flashback, Essam is positioned as “himself ” and observes

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himself as a young man; in the present, during his act of prostitution, he gives pleasure to the symbolic perpetrator, the elderly Israeli, who, given his age, could have been the soldier during the 1967 war: Essam is his prostitute, and so he is positioned as his mother. The elderly Israeli observes Essam in a way that gives him pleasure or sexual stimulation, as in the past (during the primal scene fantasy), Essam had observed his mother. Though the incidents are different, of course, the fantasmatic analogy of Laplanche and Pontalis exists. The disparity in age, race, and social standing perpetuate fantasmatic exchanges between the perpetrator and the victim in the victim’s post-traumatic imagination. The film, however, does not relate only to the post-traumatic castration of Palestinian masculinity. Further to Abu-Wael’s other work, which proves “reciprocity” between Palestinian and Israeli violence, Diary reveals post-traumatic memory as bi-directional: the Nakba/Occupation also castrates the Israeli, turning him into an (impotent?) onlooker dependent on a Palestinian hustler. The scenario in the present changes the oppressive hegemonic gaze of the symbolic perpetrator, and turns it—sexually—into a look based on dependence. Still, it is clear that from the perspective of the “diary” of the male whore that this is only a momentary reversal of power relations within the political reality: the Palestinian is the illegal resident and the Occupation, with its political and economic subjugation, continues. In the present, the Palestinian depends upon the gaze of the perpetrator for survival; in the past, observing his mother had become—as a consequence of the Israeli presence in the scopic space—a masculine version of the Medusa gaze. This, as I claimed above, froze him in the vagina dentata fantasy and in self-objectifying relations. The primal scene paradigmatically emphasizes the isolation of the subject against the backdrop of the union of the parents, and imparts knowledge of adult sexuality, a situation exacerbated by the conquest and the rape. In Diary, past memory is neither dead nor alive. It is fixed neither in the stability of nostalgia nor in denial. The past haunts Essam’s consciousness in the present through various agents: memory, yearning, trauma, guilt, and the body. The ghost of the past is present in the body defeated time and again by traumatic memory’s overwhelming powers. According to Abu-Wael, nothing can free the Palestinian from his tormenting past: not remembering, not confession, and not automatic day-to-day survival. It is no wonder, then, that Diary constructs commensurability between reenactment of past traumatic events and the sexual act in the present: The editing cuts from the groaning soldier to Essam moaning as he climaxes in front of his Israeli client.

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What is the meaning of the choice of prostitution based on masturbation/ voyeurism? Of transition from fantasmatic-imaginary orgasm to an actual one? And from the Nakba to the Occupation? It is clear from the horrific incident with the Israeli prostitute that Essam’s post-traumatic sexuality divorces women from the domain of sexual pleasure. His only prospect, described above as a variation on the Medusa myth, is a re-living of the traumatic jouissance with the mother and “planting of the symbolic . . . in the materiality of the body.”19 Structuring the rape (the [supposed] orgasm of the Israeli soldier) together with Essam’s orgasm in the present signifies uniting in traumatic pleasure. Given that the two-fold traumatic violence (conquest and rape) irreversibly sabotaged Palestinian sexuality, as far as Essam is concerned physical pleasure is possible only through a post-traumatic ritual of remembrance. Diary of a Male Whore asserts that Palestinian male pleasure is totally and paradoxically dependent on the trauma of the (past and present) occupation. In this world of the body-subject,20 that is, of the subject embodied through his body, masturbation enjoys a special status. Diary undermines both structuring interracial male sexuality as penetrating and/or being penetrated and the myriad implications of colonial power relations. Representing the voyeurism of the rape as a continuation of the voyeurism of the primal scene, as discussed above, completely changes the indeterminacy of the primal scene and the possibility of sadomitical (which emphasizes identification with the father and penetration) or queer identification (which emphasizes identification with both the mother and the father). Abu-Wael’s decision to represent voyeurism/masturbation rather than homosexual contact as a form of post-traumatic sexuality takes on, I believe, a radical significance not only in regard to Palestinian castrated masculinity but to potential interracial relations as well. Under permanent occupation, this is but an alienated sexual transaction. Fantasy-ridden masturbation leaves each of them, the Israeli and the Palestinian, the one masturbating and the one looking on, isolated and captive within his own world. The film emphasizes this by almost completely avoiding any two-shots showing them together in the frame. Moreover, as Laqueur argues, masturbation contains three components: fantasy, solitude, and insatiability.21 I believe there is a direct link between them and the post-traumatic reaction. Masturbation, in fact, has a double function—it symbolizes (in a somewhat paradoxical manner) the repetitive nature of post-traumatic behavior and at the same time, as will be elaborated later, it allows a subversive view of (political, patriarchal, and sexual) repression.

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In Diary, masturbation is unique as post-traumatic repetitious behavior. In contrast to other forms of sexuality, it represents the dominance of post-trauma in the solitary life of the Palestinian male since in an almost literal sense it is based on repetition compulsion. The power of masturbation as a physical accompaniment to post-traumatic reenactment is embodied in its practice, based on continual repetition. In other words, because of its repetitive character, masturbation probably corresponds more than any other form of sexuality (either penetrating or penetrated) to traumatic repetition. Essam seems to bodily enact the inaccessibility of past images by repeating them over and over: the repetition embodied in masturbation turns it both into a metaphor for and a performance of this compulsive practice. In this sense, masturbation symbolizes the perpetuation of trauma. Each night the Palestinian male serves as a hustler (post-traumatic reenaction/masturbation) makes him reproduce anew the seemingly interminable past. The film alludes, of course, to Jean Genet’s novel The Thief ’s Journal (Journal du Voleur)22 and his short film A Love Song (Un Chant d’amour, 1950). Subordinating Essam’s adult Palestinian subjectivity to colonial interracial relations is noteworthy given Abu-Wael’s homage to Mohamed Choukri’s autobiographical novel For Bread Alone.23 Though most of the narrative elements appear in both, Choukri’s world is more dominant than Genet’s in Diary. Although Choukri’s novel about Genet, Jean Genet in Tangier, is free of Orientalism,24 Abu-Wael apparently abstains from referring more directly to The Thief ’s Journal because Genet’s persona is infamously linked to Western sexual projections on the East, especially on Morocco. His diary and well-known film are present in Abu-Wael’s film mainly in his use of masturbation as a medium. As an autobiographical memoir, For Bread Alone describes appalling brutality in Choukri’s home; escaping his father; life on the street; abject poverty; and his wanderings—from Tangier to Algeria—in a constant search for casual work, food, and shelter. It is also replete with descriptions of his male prostitution, without which he could never have survived, and homosexuality. Choukri’s childhood in Morocco during the 1950s took place against the backdrop of French colonialism and the 1952 uprising against the French, and that, apparently, is the importance of the homage for Abu-Wael. It is not by chance, therefore, that the changes he makes in the narrative elements taken from Choukri’s novel have to do with racialization: his fantasy of love for Asya is replaced by the fantasy of his mother’s rape, and oral sex with the old man is replaced by masturbating in front of him: “In order to come quickly I imagined

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that I was raping Asya in Tatwan . . . What am I doing with this old man who gave me a blow job? I will hate myself and everyone else, if I’ll keep doing this . . . he gave me fifty pesetos . . . if so, this is how one falls into prostitution.”25 Contrary to Choukri, however, who asserts in his novel that learning to read and write at 21 liberated him from the colonial, social, and familial cycles of oppression, Essam remains caught up in these cycles through prostitution and dependence on the overwhelming destructive force of post-traumatic memory. Does the film claim that liberation from the past is impossible? On one hand, as noted, the cycles of oppression take an orgasmic-repetitious form, based on “stimulation” by the past and its “release”; on the other, as hinted above, masturbation itself allows a subversive view of repression, and alludes to its possible disruption. Though Essam’s masturbation is part and parcel of his prostitution, that is, carried out on the borderline between privacy-secrecy and sociability-openness, it is still beyond social panoptic control and defies Israeli society at least as much as it defies Palestinian. Essam’s subject position as a witness to the conquest and to rape is problematic, and not only regarding the ambivalence of his actual presence in the time and place of the trauma. It is also problematic vis-à-vis the extent to which Essam has lost moral authority emanating from being a bystander to an atrocity. Diary does not judge its protagonist. The disparaging force of post-traumatic memory and latent guilt produces a constant performance of embodied reiteration in which the imaginary witness doomed by an overwhelming past becomes self-oppressive. The following analysis entails a shift from the nuanced psychoanalytical explorations (mainly of the primal scene) adopted in the above analysis of Diary of a Male Whore to a primarily cultural analysis of The Bubble and Gevald, especially regarding such terms as passing, performance, shame/pride, and race. The nature of Fox’s and Braun’s films warrants such a shift. Diary’s linking of traumatic histories to queer sexualities is based, as described above, on the fantasy of origin and identity; that is, on exploration of the foundation of the Palestinian subject. As I see it, Bubble and Gevald, though very disparate in style and ideology, are clearly films made in a sovereign country, eliminating the need to delve into the traumatic origins of the subject (psychoanalytically and/ or historically), since they are taken for granted. Diary, driven by the Palestinian lack of state and unrelieved traumatization by a colonial regime, is “forced” to dive into the origins of subjecthood and decipher its vicissitudes from the Nakba onward. In other words, the following shift in methodology from psychoanalysis

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to cultural studies is an outcome of the huge disparity between the relationships of the films to their respective political-social contexts.

The Bubble—projecting a suicidal fantasy The Bubble focuses on forbidden love between Noam (Ohad Knoller), a young Israeli man who lives in a bohemian quarter of Tel Aviv, and Ashraf (Yousef “Joe” Sweid), a young Palestinian man from Nablus. Ashraf lives with Noam and his roommates Yelli (Aron Friedman), who is a gay man, and Lulu (Daniela Virtzer), a young woman. On their advice he takes the Hebrew name Shimi and pretends to be Israeli; he gradually becomes part of the gay Leftist community. When he decides to tell his beloved sister Rana (Roba Blal) he is gay, she angrily disapproves. Rana marries Jihad (Shredi Jabarin), a local Az-Adin El-Kassam leader, but the morning after the wedding she is accidentally killed by Israeli soldiers searching for the perpetrator of the latest Tel Aviv suicide attack, in which Yelli had been injured. Jihad tries to force Ashraf into marrying his cousin and threatens to reveal Ashraf ’s secret if he refuses. Instead, Ashraf decides to revenge Rana’s death in place of Jihad. In the final scene, with a bomb strapped to his body, Ashraf comes to the Tel Aviv restaurant where he used to work as a waiter. Noam, his Israeli lover, hugs him in greeting and the two explode. The film opens with two reversals that are symbolically tied to the fantasmatic ideologies on which it is based: “passing” and the “enlightened occupation” (which enables an interracial romantic love). The first occurs in the opening scene at a checkpoint, where Ashraf, together with the other Palestinian men standing there, follows regulations and lifts his shirt. The gaze of an Israeli soldier attempting to discover hidden explosives, which has become one of the symbols of the Occupation, reverses when Ashraf returns the gaze (of Noam, a reserve soldier standing in front of him). The militaristic gaze, based on racialization and racial differentiation, becomes, in Fox’s queer Israeli narrative, a sexual gaze, following the “love at first sight” formula. The second reversal is tied to the arbitrariness of the plot that makes the romance possible: Ashraf passes the checkpoint and later goes to Noam’s apartment in Tel Aviv to return Noam’s Israeli identity card, which he had dropped at the checkpoint. This is a fantasmatic reversal of the modus operandi of the Occupation, in which Palestinian identity cards are handled by Israeli soldiers, and not the opposite. Returning the gaze and the identity card

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presciently symbolizes within the political reality of the second Intifada the geo-psychological space of fantasmatic identity reversals. This denies the reality of the Occupation and makes it ideologically “enlightened.” These reversals are the cause of a two-fold passing fantasy for Ashraf—both spatial (crossing the border between Tel Aviv and Nablus) and sexual (passing as an Israeli gay in Tel Aviv). Spatial passing in Bubble is constructed as gay fantasy which disavows its political scopic dimension. Gay liberation, that is, the process of gay-ization that Ashraf undergoes under the supervision and guidance of gay Israelis, replaces acknowledgment of the urgency to liberate the closed Palestinian space (as well as the political-historical factors that created the pathology of the Occupation). It seems as if the Israeli gays give Ashraf refuge and out him; in reality, Bubble constructs them adhering to the spatial fantasy (denial of the Occupation) through a semicolonial act, the gay-ization of Ashraf (see Figure 8.2). In this sense, despite the interracial love story, Bubble is part of the Western model of gayness that Joseph Massad considers oppressive. In his groundbreaking work, Desiring Arabs, he claims that this oppressive discourse, which he calls the Gay International, is the direct outcome of an “orientalist impulse borrowed from predominant representations of Arab and Muslim cultures in the United

Figure 8.2 Romantic love enables denial of the Occupation: Ashraf (right) and Noam in The Bubble. Photo: Karin Bar. Courtesy of Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky.

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States and in European countries.”26 Massad argues that the Gay International “produces homosexuals, as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist, and represses same-sex desires and practices that refuse to be assimilated into its sexual epistemology.”27 The Gay International especially affects the persecution of the yet un-Westernized poor and nonurban men “who practice same-sex contact and who do not necessarily identify as homosexual or gay.”28 This imperialist-missionary project therefore destroys the sexual beings it wants to “liberate.”29 In contrast to Diary, Fox’s film contains absolutely no representation of Ashraf ’s process of sexual maturity within his society. This exemplifies the problem Massad points to, and thus strengthens his claim that the universalization of gay rights is based on the premise that “‘Oriental’ desires . . . exist . . . in ‘oppressive—and in some cases murderous home-lands,’” and therefore are “re-oriented to—and subjected by a ‘more enlightened’ Occident.”30 As described above, in Fox’s film, Ashraf ’s gay-ization is masked as a spatial and sexual enlightened liberation; but in fact, the colonialist gaze at the checkpoint is converted into the gay gaze that controls Ashraf ’s behavior in passing rituals (changing his name, biography, attire, accent, bodily gestures, and lifestyle). In this sense, gay Israelis supervising Ashraf ’s passing as an Israeli is but a variation on the Israeli surveillance regime. Both at the checkpoint and in Tel Aviv, passing is based on checking racial identity. By making confirmation of identity dependent on the Israeli gaze, Bubble denies the pervasiveness of Israeli politics of surveillance: the film structures these gazes as two different mechanisms of confirmation, while in actuality the same omnipresent gaze tries to determine if he is a Palestinian/an illegal resident/a potential terrorist. Structuring Palestinian passing in Fox’s queer cinema conforms to the basic definition of passing as “a performance in which one presents oneself as what one is not.”31 I suggest that under a scopic regime, passing inevitably involves its traumatic failure. According to Carole-Anne Tyler, “In fact, passing can only name the very failure of passing, an indication of a certain impossibility at its heart, of the contradictions which constitute it: life/death, being/non-being, visibility/invisibility, speech/silence, difference/sameness, knowledge/ignorance, coming out/mimicry.”32 Ashraf ’s failure of passing is not only the epistemological failure described by Tyler and others, for example, Ginsberg;33 the failure prophesized by Massad;34 or that defined by Homi K. Bhabha as “not quite/not white,” that is, one embedded in colonial relations.35 Bhabha describes mimicry as an ambivalent and ironic

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compromise: “colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”36 As a form of colonial discourse, mimicry poses as least as much an immanent threat on Whiteness as does imitation and appropriation: The failure of passing in the context of the Intifada, as I hinted at above, is the result of it being dependent upon a political culture based on the gaze as a means of hegemony, subjugation, and control. Ashraf wants to look like an Israeli, but does not want to be Israeli/ Jewish. Despite that, he wants to be gay and look like an (Israeli?) gay. It should be noted that Ashraf participates not only in his stylization as Shimi, a young Israeli, through the gaze of the gays around him, but also through his Jew-ization, as exemplified by his adoption of a loving gesture from the Israeli stage adaptation of Bent (Sherman, 1979) that he saw with Noam. Should Israeli queer cinema, which structures Jew-ization as the climax of the process of gay-ization, be seen, following Massad, as contributing to “destroying social and sexual configurations of [Arab-Islamic] desire in the interest of reproducing a (Arab) world in its own image?”37 Is the dominance of the scopic regime a means of avoiding Bhabha’s split, that is, the immanent threat of mimicry?38 What happens when an Israeli performs passing? Does Bubble, like Diary, reveal the interdependences of the Israeli and the Palestinian? Does it expose Bhabha’s double bind of mimicry, “where the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed?”39 After someone at the Tel Aviv restaurant exposes “Shimi” as a Palestinian, he panics and returns to Nablus. Noam is despondent over his loss and Lulu obtains a temporary foreign press card so they can travel to Nablus to visit him. They decide to pass the checkpoint by impersonating French journalists, and introduce themselves as such at Ashraf ’s home. They set up a clandestine meeting between Noam and Ashraf using the excuse that he invited them to photograph his sister Rana’s wedding for French television. Noam and Lulu’s passing is for the most part spatial. They own the cultural capital necessary to insinuate themselves into forbidden spaces.40 In a complete reversal of Palestinian passing, Israeli passing, in both senses of the word, is entirely void of racialization.41 Lulu and Noam’s decision to pretend to be French rather than Palestinian suggests that Israelis would almost never consider passing themselves off as Palestinian. The two Israelis are not exposed to the gaze at the checkpoint since in any case, as foreign journalists they are in an advantageous position. In fact, for a short while they simply exchange their privileged position as Israelis for a different one. Accordingly, Lulu and Noam’s passing does not

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make them renounce their denial of the social pathologies Palestinians undergo at the checkpoints. Assuming the identity of French journalists, passing into the Palestinian space, and Noam pretending to be heterosexual in Ashraf ’s home are all temporary impostures that were never meant to lead to closeness to the other, either racially or sexually, or—similar to the Israeli client in Diary—experiences of social marginality and multiple subject positions. Consequently, the level of spatial fantasy makes the trip to Nablus both practically and symbolically futile in its attempt to structure the Israeli world as open to otherness.42 Moreover, Fox’s playfulness fantasy relates to these forbidden spaces as unconflictual, free of danger. In contrast, Noam’s passing is a dramatic turning point in Ashraf ’s life: After Jihad, his future brother-in-law, sees him kissing Noam, he is trapped. His reaction during his secret meeting with Noam (“Do you want them to kill me? Are you crazy?”) is a portent of the future. Bubble represses not only the disparity between Noam’s playfulness and Ashraf ’s falling into a trap, but the meaning of the asymmetric passings. In fact, the mischievous heterosexual passing of Noam in Nablus is the cause of the traumatic failure of Ashraf ’s heterosexual passing in Arab society (see Figure 8.3). Eytan Fox’s Israeli queer cinema, which contributed to Israeli society’s homo-normative legitimating process during the 1980s and 1990s (mainly

Figure 8.3 Palestinian passing in The Bubble: Lulu (left), Noam, Ashraf, and Yali. Photo: Karin Bar. Courtesy of Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky.

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through the success of the television series Florentin [1997] and Yossi and Jagger [2002]), fantasmatically denies racial differences during the 2000s, revealing the failure of Bubble to establish queer epistemology in a colonial ethnic-sexual space. The gay-ization of the Palestinian masked as romantic love enables the ongoing denial of the Occupation, the humiliation of the Palestinian, and their replacement by gay pride. This is especially noticeable because the editing links the Nablus visit with a rave party demonstration against the Occupation—a sort of substitute for a gay pride parade. Judith Halberstam claims that “shame can be a powerful tactic in the struggle to make privilege (whitening, masculinity, wealth) visible.”43 She strongly criticizes the identity politics of white gay males that exclude the queer adult brown man, the absence of appropriate white gay masculine language for discussing shame, and the role of the brown gay male body in the white shame narrative. She presents—while criticizing—three solutions to the white gay male shame: normalization (gay white men can work through gay shame by producing normative masculinities and presenting themselves as uncastrated, muscular, whole), projection/aestheticization, and adoption of “gay shame [that] can be used . . . in ways that are feminist and antiracist.”44 Unlike the Israeli gay who has come out of the closet and romanticizes gay pride in order to deal with his shame, Ashraf ’s situation in the context of shame as a “gendered form of sexual abjection” is complex.45 The tension between being closeted or out that Ashraf is forced to deal with does not conceal the tension between pride and shame (exemplified by his participation in the rave), but rather between (gay) pride and (racial) humiliation. To-be-gazed-at at the checkpoint is for Ashraf a physical experience of shame (involving feminization and castration), which (in contrast to Noam’s experience) undergoes racialization and is not transformed into pride. The checkpoint experience, unlike the childhood experiences of the white gay, is not transformed from “abjection, isolation, and rejection into legibility, community, and love.”46 This is true not only because Ashraf is too young to have had the chance to adopt the theoretical language of the adult queer in order to recognize his sexuality, as Halberstam claims regarding Western gay communities. For Ashraf, humiliation at the checkpoint is both gay shame and racial humiliation. It cannot, therefore, be reinterpreted or resituated in the gay pride world. The film does not offer the option of recognizing both worlds; the more Ashraf becomes gay within the Israeli community, the more his experiences at the checkpoint are suppressed. Bubble does not directly address the latent collusion between the different

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apparatuses of repression and is therefore not critical of the tension between racial shame and gay pride. Israeli queer cinema offers the solution of projection: instead of recognizing the ethnic humiliation of the Occupation, it projects white gay male shame on the “brown male” in the “white narrative” it rewrites. This projection is intensified through disavowals: first, through the playfulness of Noam’s passing, that is, by gaining access to vulnerability and humiliation without embodying it; second, through Ashraf ’s self gay-ization, displacing racial humiliation with gay pride (When he arrives late at the rave, for example, he hurriedly apologizes and mumbles something about how hard it was to get there and about the checkpoint, and immediately joins the party); and third, through romanticizing the terror. Indeed, is it surprising that Ashraf finds himself at the vanishing point of subjectivity? In structuring the suicidal terrorist, the gay Israeli narrative fantasy reaches its most extreme juncture. What is the relation between romance and terror? Between presenting sexual relations and presenting the suicidal terrorist? Bubble offers a more progressive representation of interracial sexual relationships between men than had appeared in Israeli cinema before the turn of the century; that is, it is not based on power relationships tied to the tension between penetrating and penetrated. Ashraf and Noam change positions according to the anal-oral circuit. As Elizabeth Grosz has written, “It may be this . . . that distinguishes heterosexual men from many gay men who are prepared not only to send out but also to receive flow and in this process to assert other bodily regions than those singled out by the phallic function.”47 Even though the film presents a radical sexual structure freed from constraints of (cinematic) tradition, hierarchy, and perception of the body as a battlefield, the gay Israeli narrative cannot integrate the gay racial body (even if, or perhaps because, the narrative rewrites it, à la Massad, as a nonracial body).48 The result is a fantasy of loss. The film does not present the suicide terrorist as a radical fundamentalist Moslem, Israeli society’s conventional profile, but as a person whose sexuality is repressed and despairs of ever being able to live as a proud gay in Arab society; that is, he is tragically unable to work through shame and humiliation. Bubble does not take responsibility for the (lack of) awareness and/or the playfulness of the “enlightened” Israeli. By tying shahidism to the tragic detachment of a man from his social image as well as to traditional Arab society’s attitude toward homosexuality, the Israeli narrative is able to cast off its guilt for both Ashraf ’s gay-ization and his becoming a suicide terrorist. Bubble chooses to solve this

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through projection, since the film is unable to contain its own epistemological contradictions in a racial and scopic context. Although I do not completely agree with Massad’s vehement belief in a Western narrative conspiracy (inter alia because he regards the various Western queer schools monolithic), it is clear that the starting point for understanding this contradiction is linked, as he claims, to colonialism. I believe it is also linked to colonial guilt, which by and large Massad obviously does not relate to. By structuring a terrorist attack, Fox’s cinematic narrative of the Israeli gay during the post second Intifada projects the repressed sin of denying the Occupation (shame/humiliation) onto the closeted Palestinian gay. Noam pays the price of unconscious guilt when he becomes the victim. But even this quasi-confession of unconscious guilt for denying the Occupation undergoes gay romanticization during the final scene of the film. This scene presents an imaginary picture of Ashraf and Noam as children playing together in a playground in Jerusalem, where the Israeli neighborhood French Hill converges with the Arab village of Esawiya. The shift from the romanticized fantasy of lost coupling (the camera circles the two at the moment of the explosion; Noam’s words of love contrast with the sight of their shrouded bodies) to that of a shared childhood is anchored in Noam’s narration; that is, not in Ashraf ’s (or the shahidic promise of paradise),49 but in a seemingly shared fantasy of reconciliation. Except that Ashraf and his family abandoned Esawiya after their home had been demolished and traded their identity as Arabs holding Israeli citizenship to become Palestinian refugees in Nablus. Furthermore, Noam recalls a conflict from his childhood over whether to allow Arab children from Esawiya to play together with Israelis in French Hill. That is to say, Noam “returns” post-mortem to the moment of “enlightened” reconciliation. Ashraf seemingly “returns” (in Noam’s fantasy) to the same reconciliation, but in actuality returns to an asymmetric and repressive reality of the Occupation. Regardless of the nostalgia for a lost paradise of a common childhood (which never occurred), the fantasmatic picture of the two with their mothers is taken from the reservoir of Israeli rather than Palestinian images.

Gevald—a queer terrorist show In contrast to Bubble, Netalie Braun’s short film Gevald is a radical queer text in every respect. Self-reflexive and multilayered, it presents gay and lesbian bonding in a communal environment shared by Israelis and Palestinians, in which the

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Palestinian lesbian is given voice. Although terror also hits this community, the source is ambiguous. More important, however, is that there is no projection of violence on the other, as in Bubble, because pre-terror relations are based on multiethnic queer bonding unaffected by colonialism’s evils. Thus, as “a site of contention,”50 queer bonds in Gevald “name a mode of recognition to the side of this deadly epistemology [of the closet], a laterally constituted togetherness that persists in the face of homophobia, sustains us, and allows queer life to go on.”51 Gevald was intended to be screened at a festival usually held at the close of the annual Jerusalem gay pride parade. As the film’s opening titles indicate, three participants were stabbed by an ultra-Orthodox (Haredi)52 Jew during the 2005 parade; in 2006 the ultra-Orthodox community protested and fought desperately to cancel the parade. After first being postponed, it took place in a closed stadium. Set in a gay club in West Jerusalem on the eve of the 2006 parade, the film’s exaggerated rhetoric immediately reveals that it was inspired by the Pashkevil. This Yiddish word, which means protest or a cry for help, refers to posters pasted on public walls in the ultra-Orthodox community. Frequently used to publicly attack or undermine a person or group, it spells out what is virtuous or acceptable behavior and what is not. Despite the proliferation of other modes of mass communication, the Pashkevil endures as one of the primary weapons of the ultra-Orthodox community and one of its main sources of entertainment. Through editing; sound bridge; and insertion of footage, Braun (who is also the scriptwriter) reflects on both functions. For instance, the editing cuts from footage of a Haredi demonstration where homosexuals are described as beasts and there are calls to “stop the abomination” during a “wedding” performed between two real donkeys in the streets of Jerusalem dressed in pink blankets with the word gay written on them, to a drag show in which a singer, dressed as a cow, ironically performs the Hebrew version of “Old MacDonald.” Thus, by embodying and mocking homophobic hatred, the gay community at the bar enthusiastically participates in an imaginary confrontation with Jewish fundamentalism (see Figure 8.4). However, it is Moslem fundamentalism that is staged as the radical show intermingled with the film’s main (Israeli) lesbian love story between a secular dyke (Noga Meltzer) and her religious ex-lover, Na’ama, who comes to the club on the eve of her own arranged marriage to warn her ex-lover of the threat of ultra-Orthodox violence at the parade. In the queer space of the bar, they watch a drag-king show performed by lesbian Palestinians: Youssuf, a young Palestinian

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Figure 8.4 The Donkeys’ Wedding—Gevald. Courtesy of Netalie Braun.

wearing the traditional Arab galabiyya, is singing a heterosexual Saudi love song (by Hussein Al Jamsi) to his lover Jabbar, while the latter is preparing for a suicide mission. The camera shows Jabbar in a semi-striptease act exposing his half-naked body covered in metallic strips representing an explosive belt as he puts on a jacket and reads the Koran. Youssuf confesses his belief in their eternal love and finally expresses the song’s words of separation: “Go! I will accept your absence!” The drag show is multilayered: First, the names Youssuf and Jabbar parody Eytan Fox’s popular Israeli gay film Yossi and Jagger that tells the love story of two male soldiers, one of whom dies in battle in Lebanon. The drag act recasts Fox’s homo-normative national gay love story into a queer Palestinian narrative of fundamentalism and opposition embodied by the suicide bomber. Parody is both like and unlike, it re- as well as a trans-contextualizes previous work.53 Like other modes of repetition, parody is a mise en abyme, a “mirroring” of the origins of the process of realistic figuration, and consequently has a meta-fictional function. This has a special resonance in Youssuf and Jabbar’s act: Fully available for repetition, impersonation, and appropriation, Israeli masculinity is represented as unstable and fraudulent by Palestinian “kinging,” as Judith Halberstam calls this sensibility.54 Kinging undermines the Israeli soldier’s bodily hegemony and alleged superiority over the Palestinian masculine body through parody. Thus, kinging the terror not only parodies, but transcends the well-known historic definitions of the Jewish-Israeli masculine body (described by Boyarin, Biale, and

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others) beyond the “feminine-masculine/ diasporic-Sabra/ Old Jew-New Jew” transformations. Queering terror through kinging, that is, expands traditional Israeli body conceptualizations and calls for a new, hybrid, epistemology (see Figure 8.5). Second, the parody refers to Yossi and Jagger’s secret gay love as well as to the Palestinian couple’s and Na’ama’s presumably hidden secrets. In this way, unlike The Bubble, both Jewish and Moslem fundamentalism is named as the cause of the real and imagined romantic separations on and off stage. Challenging the primacy, authenticity, and originality of dominant masculinities, staged and costumed masculinity channels ethnic and gendered secrets through the drag act. The third layer revealed in Youssuf and Jabbar’s drag-king show relates to yet another performance. Na’ama’s ex-lover translates the Saudi love song into Hebrew for her while they are watching the show. Translating the Palestinian

Figure 8.5 Youssuf and Jabbar—kinging in Gevald. Courtesy of Netalie Braun.

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love song becomes the means through which the Israeli lesbian love story is imaginarily reenacted and narrativized.55 The similarities between Youssuf and Jabbar’s love and forced separation and that of the two lesbians create a layer of hommage to Yossi and Jagger’s unfulfilled love as a source of inspiration, a romantic myth. Using the Palestinian narrative as a substitute for reappraising their own relationship helps the women communicate a richness of feelings and impressions they cannot express in words. It emphasizes the resemblance to the love stories of the internal and as well as external others—Yossi and Jagger; Youssuf and Jabber—despite the disparate contexts. Translation, therefore, becomes production, not reproduction. Based on four levels of enunciation (lip-syncing the Saudi song, performance of a drag-king show, parody of an Israeli film, and narrativization of a lesbian relationship), translation, performed as an emancipatory practice, focuses on the ways bonding is structured in/by language. In other words, knowing the other’s language and participating in his creative ethno-sexual reflection becomes a way for the Israeli lesbians to (dis)place themselves in a reality burdened by fundamentalism. Gevald’s queering of terror, which involves transtextual or hypertextual relations, functions as a palimpsest working on problematic ethno-sexual notions of identity, dependency, and resistance. Both parody/hommage and lip-sync/translation concern themselves with inter-discursive repetition. The lip-sync and the translation of the Arabic song into Hebrew, are, in fact, two similar forms of repetition (sung and spoken) of the words of others, and thus embody a fantasmatic form based on resemblance to truth. The texts’ meaning is derived from being transformed, which entails a steady tension between fantasy and reality. Fourth, Gevald’s subversiveness lies in how it integrates Palestinian and Israeli texts and parody and hommage, and especially in its open-endedness. Repeating the words of love uttered before the planned suicide is a portent of the deadly blast at the end of the show. The terrorist’s kinging body, which, beginning with the semi-striptease, crosses the gender boundaries, is finally subjected to objecthood.56 The Israeli lesbian ex-lovers, who participate in the show through the self-reflexive translation, ironically assume through translation-as-repetition the imaginary status of the two Palestinian and Israeli gay couples, projecting on themselves a “no future,” to use Lee Edelman’s famous thesis regarding the death drive and queer negation of the social order.57

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The film leaves the source of the explosion unknown, though it tacitly suggests that in this climate of intensified repression, it was a Haredi hate crime. But, blurring the boundaries between fiction and documentary, the explosion eerily recalls the drag show’s suicide bomber. Gevald resembles Bubble in its tragic ending, though the queering process and thus self-projected violence are entirely different. Gevald’s gay and lesbian club, unlike the urban bubble in The Bubble, becomes a counter-reality to the failed parade in which both real and imagined fundamentalist violence are negotiated, tested through their theatricality, and comprehended as radically unpredictable. Through celebration of opposition, it offers both Israeli and Palestinian drag queen and king shows for the pleasure of internal and external audiences. In this, the film turns the club to an imaginary space, where the relations between colonizers and colonized are expressed in terms of bonding, copresence, interaction, and communality. As an Israeli film, it even suggests that the outside reality’s dialectics of the dominant/subordinate can be conceptualized as the symbolic performance of Palestinian coming-into-being as shahid. Conjuring Palestinian resistance authenticates the performance and elevates the Palestinian production of new identity. Taking for granted the objecthood, queering the terror underscores not only how the negotiations of lesbian love are implicated within contestatory “acts” of representation, but how uncontainable is the excess of the sexual function in a repressive order. In this, “queer bonds mark the simultaneity of ‘the social’ and a space of sociability outside, to the side of, or in the interstices of ‘the social’— bonds that occur not in spite of but because of some force of negation, in which it is precisely negativity that organizes scenes of togetherness.”58

Conclusion—queering terror In the three films analyzed here—Diary of a Male Whore, The Bubble, and Gevald— the process of queering terror is presented as based on the Occupation’s traumas and entailed fantasies. However, the mechanism of trauma (self-objectification through an acting-out of past violence, guilty projection of violence onto the other, fatal conceptualization of queerness under a repressive environment, respectively) and the content of fantasy (castrated memories, gay-ization, ethno-sexual bonding) attest to the marked differences in the perspectives and ideologies of these films.

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Diary of a Male Whore, The Bubble, and Gevald present mirror images that refer to the perennial other. The three films deal with intimate bodily interracial interaction or bonding, and the symbolic and actual violence of the Israeli Occupation precludes their proximity from being free of either past or present traumas. The imaginary bodily merger becomes a real or fantasmatic parting, and leads to temporal or eternal loss. In Diary, after Essam gets paid he is seen wandering the streets of Tel Aviv, with the red lights of passing cars signifying future danger. In the last scene of Bubble, the lovers’ bodies are seen from a high angle shot, in the center of the suicide site. In Gevald, after the explosion, on the background of a black frame, a tearful drag queen performs Annie Lenox’s “Why?” as a reflexive elegy.59 Will Essam become an Ashraf or will he become a “Jabbar”? This absurd post-textual question makes it clear that although the films stage a psychic mirroring pattern, there is an essential gap between them, as the immense differences in the nature of ethno-sexual relationships—financial transaction, romantic love, and queer bonding—reveal. Analysis of the main mechanisms of sexual and ethnic repression attests to antagonistic consciousness that places the Nakba/Occupation; the rape; and the hustling on one side, and racial denial of the Occupation; denial of the scopic regime; gay-ization; and homo- (suicidal) romance on the other. In the middle, queering the terror act turns “a sociality created in . . . moments of enjoyment”60 into a shattered one. The analyses of Diary and Bubble discussed in this chapter, which point to the striking differences between the depictions of interracial relationships in the two films, seek to examine the significance of these differences. More specifically, they, as well as Gevald, seek to explore what these differences mean to Palestinian versus Jewish-Israeli understanding of fe/male (homo)sexualities; repression; and identification, and to explore the place of post-traumatic fantasy in shaping the encounter between the I and the other in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Diary’s defiance intermingles with its claim of victimhood, and though Fox’s film makes a similar claim, his definition of victim is totally different. As I hope the above analysis has shown, in Abu Wael’s film, victimhood— presented as a direct outcome of Israeli policies of exclusion, occupation, and dispossession—is an ever-reenacted irrefutable subject position onto which the collaborator’s identity is carefully sutured. Therefore, it is not clear how the rape as the constitutive event of Essam’s post-traumatic identity stands in relation to Frantz Fanon’s claim that “the concern about heterosexual rape functions

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doubly: it attends, importantly, to violence against women, but it also forcefully masks triangulated desire, whereby the fear—and fantasy—of the penetrated male is displaced onto the safer figure of the raped female.”61 The link in editing between the primal scene and the rape, described above, points to the power these events have had on Essam’s solitary form of sexuality. Diary’s retrospective fantasizing turns Fanon’s and Bhabha’s colonized apparently “same but not quiet” desire into self-staged victimhood, even to the point of risking pathologizing queer sexualities. Moreover, as claimed above, both the primal scene and the rape suggest how queer sexualities might form the basis for understanding the link between loss of sovereignty and post-traumatic subjectivity (in this respect, Abu Wael’s liminal position as an Arab-Israeli director is very much like that of his protagonist). Both films require the fantasmatic to work through the pathologies of interracial sexual relations—be it a past-oriented fantasy, as in Diary, or a future-oriented one, post-mortem, as in Bubble. But the gap between Abu Wael’s endless acting out, which becomes a device for self-examination and Fox’s “benign” ethnocentrism points not only to disparate options of using the fantasmatic in cinema, or different narrativizations, but, in Bhabah’s words, to epistemic violence.62 By fantasizing suicidal terrorism, post-second Intifada Israeli gay narrative (in The Bubble) projects the repressed sin of denial of the Occupation on the closeted Palestinian gay; that is, on traditional Palestinian society. In this way, it rids itself of any sexual or political responsibility. Nostalgia for the imaginary paradise of a shared childhood is part and parcel of this denial. The sexual celebration of the Israeli white gay produces only a façade of victimhood shared by the Palestinian and the Israeli. Although the suicidal terrorist attack might be interpreted as an unconscious guilt-ridden Israeli act of self-loss, it still, in contrast to Gevald’s representation, ignores the ethnic otherness. Transforming the Arab Ashraf into the Israeli Shimi not only makes him invisible, but precludes any interconnectedness between sexual and ethnic mechanisms of repression. Projecting gay-ization and the violence of the Occupation on the destructiveness of the Palestinian suicide terrorist while avoiding any subversive attitude toward the (ethnic or sexual) Israeli occupational order stands in sharp contrast to the ethnic and sexual subversiveness of Diary and Gevald. Till the very end, Noam does not interpret Ashraf ’s suicide as a mirror-image of himself; that is, as a racially violent projection of Israelis onto Palestinians. Moreover, the deferred deaths of Ashraf and Noam, embodied in the final scene’s postmortem

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redemption, are taken from the Israeli bereavement myth that presents shared death as an integral part of men’s comradeship. This myth plays a central role in Israeli society and contributes to forging a gendered and eroticized nationalism. In complete contrast to the drag-king show in Gevald, Bubble expands the boundaries of this myth in service of the restaging of both Ashraf ’s Jew-ization and Israel-ization, regardless of the circumstances—Israeli and Palestinian “buddies” dying in a terrorist attack rather than Israeli comrades-in-arms killed in war. In other words, the mechanisms operative in the conflictual interaction between Israeli-Jews and Palestinians stand at the fateful juncture of sexual and national claims to gay and lesbian pride; love; desire; and pleasure, on one hand, and space; rights; justice; communality; and acknowledgment, on the other. The collapse of othering stands at the core of these processes and inhibits new possibilities of the self and identity while curtailing the development of alternative modalities of belonging, connectivity, and intimacy. Under the Occupation, queerness becomes an ethical positioning in Diary of a Male Whore, and to a lesser degree in Gevald, but not in The Bubble. Teresa de Lauretis suggests that a queer text is one that “carries the inscription of sexuality as something more than sex . . . as enigma without solution and trauma without resolution.”63 During and after the Intifada period, however, as these films show, queering cannot sustain the burden of enigma. If, indeed, the history of queer theory is defined in terms of “an interplay between a centrifugal drive away from sociality and a centripetal pressure toward sociable belonging and linkage,”64 the films discussed here show that under Israeli occupation, the ethical queer position necessarily entails pressure away from sociality to self-extinction. The “anti-social thesis” has a different manifestation and ramification within the context of the Intifada, regardless of different forms of queer communality. It is precisely in face of the danger of double (ethnic and sexual) repression that the question of undertaking a false identity (by Shimi in Bubble or even by Na’ama, and Youssuf and Jabbar, in Gevald) is endowed with surplus value. As Diary shows, erotic forms of sociability come into being only under the shadow of post-trauma. Thus, in a social space torn apart and under an ethnic disguise (an illegal resident pretending to be legal), queering cannot become an “inventive sociality.”65 As an antisocial form, it calls into question the meaning of the social in a practical and symbolic order imposed on the illegal hustler in order to (psychologically and practically) survive. Under Israeli occupation, the films apparently point to two opposing body trajectories: either projecting violence on the other, as in suicide bombing; or

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on oneself, as in hustling. However, in both Israeli films, which set the suicidal terrorist figure, projecting violence on the ethnic other also means projecting violence on oneself. In other words, a deep regressive guilt-driven desire for death lurks beneath the surface of Israeli forms of queering terror. It is enacted in the extreme when deep denial is involved in textual processes of queering (Bubble) and to a lesser degree, when the fantasy of a liberal, pleasurable, multiethnic gay and lesbian communality is taken for granted to be short-termed and doomed under the pressures of outside reality. Diary of a Male Whore, The Bubble, and Gevald revolve around possible encounters between the I and the other (prostitution, masturbation, gay-ization, passing, romance, communal bonding). In the contested post-traumatic spaces of the 1948 Nakba, the 1967 conquest, and the second Intifada, these encounters are subjected to denial, repression, projection, and fantasy. By proving the unavoidable failure of the (fantasmatic) mirror-images of each another (albeit as a drag show), in the end the films do not represent a wished-for (cinematic) reconciliation, but rather a reproduction of the unsolvable pathology of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Queering terror, that is, is revealed to be a suicidal end.

Notes 1 Rebecca Stein, “Explosive: Eytan Fox’s Gay Occupation,” GLQ 16 (2010); Raz Yosef, “Homoland: Interracial Sex and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Israeli Cinema,” GLQ 8 (2002). 2 Hamid Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema (London: Verso, 2006); Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008). 3 The original title is Yawmiyat Ahir. The term ahir appears here in its masculine form, which is not standard Arabic. It usually takes the feminine form. 4 The circumstances surrounding the production of Diary illustrate, among other things, the director’s complicated situation. During a discussion I had with Abu-Wael in September 2008, he explained that after many reversals he finally financed the film himself. Many Israelis volunteered their services for the production. 5 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 106. 6 Kaja Silverman, “Too Early/Too Late: Male Subjectivity and the Primal Scene,” in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 156.

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Deeper than Oblivion Ibid., 168. Ibid., 164. Creed, Monstrous Feminine. Silverman, “Too Early/Too Late,” 109. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in Case Histories II, trans. J. Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1918/91), 284–6. See Lee Edelman, “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex,” in Homographesis (New York: Routledge, 1994), 173–91. In contrast, see Kevin Ohi, “Devouring Creation: Cannibalism, Sodomy, and the Scene of Analysis in Suddenly, Last Summer,” Cinema Journal 38 (1999). The rape takes place, as mentioned, during the period of the Nakba. To the best of my knowledge, such rapes by Israeli soldiers only occurred before the Nakba and the establishment of the State of Israel and shortly afterward; that is, until the mid-1950s. See Tal Nitzan, The Borders of Occupation: The Rareness of Military Rape in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” [in Hebrew] (Master’s Thesis. The Hebrew University, 2006). According to Benny Morris, during the 1929 riots “leaflets . . . were distributed by Husseini activists in nearby Arab towns and villages . . . One flyer . . . declared: ‘the enemy . . . violated the honor of Islam and raped the women’” (Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict [New York: Vintage Books, 1999], 113, 700). See an analysis of rape fantasies in my forthcoming book Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. Silverman, “Too Early/Too Late,” 160. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973), 318. Jean Laplanche and Jean Bertrand Pontalis, Fantasme Originaire Fantasmes des Origines du Fantasme (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1985). Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin et al. (London: Methuen, 1986), 26–7. Ibid. Laplanche and Pontalis, Fantasme Originaire, 68–9. See Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994). Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone, 2003). Jean Genet, The Thief ’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (1949, Paris: Olympia Press, 2004). Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone [in Hebrew], trans. N. At’amna (Tel Aviv: Andalus, 1972/2000). In direct translation from the Arabic, The Barefoot Bread. The

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blatant descriptions of sex made finding a publisher in Arabic very difficult. The book was published in Arabic only in 1982, after it had already been translated into English (by Paul Bowles) and French (by Tahar Ben Jelloun). Mohamed Choukri, Jean Genet in Tangier, trans. P. Bowels (New York: Ecco Press, 1974). Choukri, Bread Alone, 81–2. This is a translation from the Hebrew edition of the book. Joseph Andoni Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 16. Ibid., 163. Ibid., 188–9. Ibid., 189–90. Joseph Andoni Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14 (2002): 364. Valerie Rohy, “Displacing Desire: Passing, Nostalgia, and Giovannis Room,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966), 218–33. Carole Anne Tyler, “Passing: Narcissism, Identity, and Difference,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (1994): 212. Elaine Ginsberg, “Introduction: The Politics of Passing,” in Passing and the Fiction of Identity, ed. Elaine Ginsberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1–21. Massad, Desiring Arabs. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1984/94), 131. Ibid., 122. Massad, Desiring Arabs, 189. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry.” Ibid., 127. Israelis are forbidden by law to enter Nablus. In this context, it is interesting to recall that the term passing may be derived from “pass,” the slip of paper that granted slaves permission to move about the countryside without being mistaken for runaways (Juda Bennett, The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Liberature [New York: Peter Lang, 1998]). See Massad, Desiring Arabs, 188, n. 103. Judith Halberstam, “Shame and White Gay Masculinity,” Social Text 23 (2005): 220. Ibid., 228–9. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 221.

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47 Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 201. 48 In this regard, see Eytan Fox’s declaration during an interview with Merav Yodilovitz: “[Yousef Sweid] was amazing, I am completely in love with him and I think he is brave. No one speaks about it, but he is the first Arab teen idol. He makes 16-year-old girls admire him and not say: ‘Disgusting Arab.’ That is power and it couldn’t have happened in the Israel I grew up in. I am very proud of him because of this achievement.” Merav Yodilovitz, “Interview of Eytan Fox,” GoGay [in Hebrew] 30 (2006). 49 The dialogue contains jokes about this: “If a homo becomes a jihad, who awaits him in heaven, seventy virgin twinks or seventy muscle hunks?” 50 Judith Butler, “Remarks on ‘Queer Bonds,’” GLQ 17 (2011): 382. 51 Joshua J. Weiner and Damon Young, “Introduction: Queer Bonds,” GLQ 17 (2011): 228. 52 “Those who fear and obey God.” 53 See Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), 11. 54 Judith Halberstam, “On Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings,” GLQ 73 (2001): 450. See also Halberstam’s groundbreaking book, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 55 The scene refers to the “lethal” club scene in Pedro Almodóvar’s High Hills (1991), in which a group of fans imitate the drag-queen performer who imitates the singer. 56 See the analysis of the suicide bomber figure and/in the Palestinian film Paradise Now (Hany abu Assad, 2005) in Raya Morag, “The Living Body and the Corpse— Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Intifadah,” Journal of Film & Video 60 (2008), esp. 10–17. 57 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 58 Weiner and Young, “Queer Bonds,” 236. 59 The final title screen says that the gay and lesbian bar, Shoushan, was closed in 2007, thus marking the hopelessness of the situation in Jerusalem both in ethnic and sexual terms. 60 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “The Part That Has No Part: Enjoyment, Law, and Loss,” GLQ 17 (2011): 289. 61 Quoted in Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duram and London: Duke University Press, 2007). 62 Bhabah, “Of Mimicry,” 60. 63 Teresa de Lauretis, “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future,” GLQ 17 (2011): 244–5. 64 Weiner and Young, “Queer Bonds,” 223. 65 As Weiner and Young claim in “Queer Bonds,” 226.

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Bibliography Bennett, Juda. The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Bhabha, Homi K. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” In The Location of Culture, 121–31. New York: Routledge, 1984/94. Butler, Judith. “Remarks on ‘Queer Bonds.’” GLQ 17, nos 2–3 (2011): 381–7. Choukri, Mohamed. For Bread Alone [in Hebrew]. Translated by N. At’amna. Tel Aviv: Andalus, 1972/2000. —. Jean Genet in Tangier. Translated by P. Bowels. New York: Ecco Press, 1974. Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Dabashi, Hamid. Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema. London: Verso, 2006. de Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future.” GLQ 17, nos 2–3 (2011): 243–64. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. —. “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex.” In Homographesis, 173–91. New York: Routledge, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis.” In Case Histories II, translated by J. Strachey, 284–6. London: Penguin Books, 1918/91. Genet, Jean. The Thief ’s Journal. 1949. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. Paris: Olympia Press, 2004. Gertz, Nurith and George Khleifi. Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008. Ginsberg, Elaine. “Introduction: The Politics of Passing.” In Passing and the Fiction of Identity, edited by Elaine Ginsberg, 1–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. —. “On Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings.” GLQ 7, no. 3 (2001): 425–52. —. “Shame and White Gay Masculinity.” Social Text 23, nos 3–4 (2005): 219–33. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. London and New York: Methuen, 1985. Laplanche, Jean and Jean Bertrand Pontalis. Fantasme Originaire Fantasmes des Origines du Fantasme. Paris: Hachette Littératures, 1985. —. “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.” In Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, 24–35. London: Methuen, 1986. —. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1973.

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Laqueur, Thomas W. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone, 2003. Massad, Joseph Andoni. Desiring Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. —. “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World.” Public Culture 14, no. 2 (2002): 361–85. Morag, Raya. “The Living Body and the Corpse—Israeli Documentary Cinema and the Intifadah.” Journal of Film & Video 60, nos 3–4 (2008): 3–24. Morris, Benny. Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–1999. New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Nitzan, Tal. “The Borders of the Occupation: The Rareness of Military Rape in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” [in Hebrew]. Master’s Thesis. The Hebrew University, 2006. Ohi, Kevin. “Devouring Creation: Cannibalism, Sodomy, and the Scene of Analysis in Suddenly, Last Summer.” Cinema Journal 38, no. 3 (1999): 27–49. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. “The Part That Has No Part: Enjoyment, Law, and Loss.” GLQ 17, nos 2–3 (2011): 288–308. Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duram and London: Duke University Press, 2007. Rohy, Valerie. “Displacing Desire: Passing, Nostalgia, and Giovannis Room.” In Passing and the Fictions of Identity, edited by Elaine K. Ginsberg, 218–33. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966. Silverman, Kaja. “Too Early/Too Late: Male Subjectivity and the Primal Scene.” In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 157–81. New York: Routledge, 1992. Stein, Rebecca. “Explosive: Eytan Fox’s Gay Occupation.” GLQ 16, no. 4 (2010): 517–36. Tyler, Carole Anne. “Passing: Narcissism, Identity, and Difference.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, nos 2–3 (1994): 212–48. Weiner, Joshua J. and Damon Young. “Introduction Queer Bonds.” GLQ 17, nos 2–3 (2011): 223–41. Yodilovitz, Merav. Interview of Eytan Fox. GoGay [in Hebrew] 30 (2006). Yosef, Raz. Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004. —. “Homoland: Interracial Sex and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Israeli Cinema.” GLQ 8 (2002): 553–79.

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“Our Traumas”: Terrorism, Tradition, and Mind Games in Frozen Days Boaz Hagin

Frozen days Danny Lerner’s first feature film, Frozen Days (2006), was presented by its director and received by critics in Israel as a unique achievement in Israeli cinema. They viewed it as a genre film, a noir thriller, shot as a “guerrilla production” on digital video with a minuscule budget of $25,000, partly taken from a script development fund and partly using the resources given to Lerner to make his graduate project at Tel Aviv University.1 This chapter describes some of the relations between trauma and memory in the film and in its paratexts. The memory I focus on is the tradition of Israeli cinema as remembered by the filmmakers and commentators at the time the film was released. I argue that Frozen Days—not unlike a handful of other recent Israeli films, such as The Debt (Assaf Bernstein, 2007), The Assassin Next Door (Danny Lerner, 2009), A Matter of Size (Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor, 2009), and The Matchmaker (Avi Nesher, 2010)—can be read as attempting to break away from the standard Israeli “festival film.” Moreover it and the other films thematize, sometimes allegorically or metonymically, this often doomed attempt to escape their cinematic surroundings and traditions. While still in thrall to these traditions, the films display an effort to find ways in which Israeli films can transcend their current forms and position, for example by entering a mainstream commercial system like Hollywood and adopting the latter’s genres and distribution methods, or by mining Israeli and Jewish collective memory for popular modes of entertainment that might appeal to a different local or international film culture. In the case of Frozen Days, it is the trauma of living

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under the constant threat of terrorism that is used in order to attempt to break free from the traditions of Israeli cinema. I will be suggesting two different options for understanding the relation between the trauma of terrorism and tradition in the film and its paratexts. According to one option, trauma allows the film to break out of the tradition of Israeli cinema and into a different cinematic system. According to the second option, this attempt is bound to fail and this probable failure resonates in the film. Frozen Days follows a young Tel Aviv drug dealer, whose name and identity remain unclear, and who is referred to in the closing credits as “Meow”—the nickname she uses when chatting on the web. The first half hour of the film depicts her adventures in a nocturnal, mostly black-and-white Tel Aviv, comprising dark alleys, abandoned shopping malls, threatening nightclubs, and empty apartments that she breaks into and in which she spends the night. She has a strange relationship with a man named Alex Kaplan, which never includes a standard face-to-face meeting: they chat on the web, talk on the phone, she misidentifies a security guard at the mall as Alex and flirts with him before realizing her mistake, and even meets Alex at his apartment, albeit during a power outage, and then flees before they have a chance to see each other when the lights go back on. Meow then goes to sell drugs at a nightclub called Koma Shtaim—a pun in Hebrew meaning both “second floor” and, at least as pronounced in the film, a “second coma”—and tells Alex to meet her at the entrance.2 When she gets there, an explosion is heard and she falls back and hits her head. After she gets up and walks away, Meow hears in a news report that there was a terrorist attack at a nightclub in Tel Aviv and that a woman who was hurt in the attack is suffering from severe head wounds. Unable to reach Alex on his cell phone, she goes to his apartment, discovers that he is not home, and decides to spend the night there. When she leaves the apartment the next morning, the next-door neighbor greets her as “Ms. Kaplan.” Meow goes to the hospital, where she is taken to see a man who was injured in the explosion the previous night and who is unconscious and completely wrapped in bandages (Figure 9.1). When she calls Alex, the injured man’s cell phone rings, and Meow reasonably assumes it is him. Meow decides to move in to Alex’s apartment and occasionally visits the man wrapped in bandages at the hospital. She tries to find out more information about him from a woman who calls his apartment and a woman Meow sees leaving his room at the hospital (Meow seems to believe it is the same woman). She gradually begins to take on various aspects of Alex Kaplan’s identity: she

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Figure 9.1 Meow visits Alex in the hospital as Frozen Days (Danny Lerner, 2006) visits Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976).

tries on his glasses, then his clothes; she discovers his timetable at work as a guard in the shopping mall, as well as his gun; she picks up his laundry and wears his uniform. Various people refer to her as Alex Kaplan: the next-door neighbor repeatedly invites her as Alex Kaplan to tenants’ meetings sometimes at 8:00 and sometimes at 8:30; the police officers who find her moped, which was stolen early on in the film, demand to see proof of identification that will verify that she is indeed Alex Kaplan before allowing her to claim it; and one of her best friends, much to her dismay, calls her “Alex.” Meow discovers that her hair has suddenly become shorter and that the other guards at the shopping mall recognize her as a coworker named “Alex.” Events that already happened before the explosion unexplainably take place again, such as a client who time after time wants free samples before buying the drugs supposedly for the first time and the presence of a man wrapped in bandages, who first appears in a dream before the explosion and then crosses over into reality and materializes in the hospital. The film’s fragmentary and repetitive character might indicate the presence of a supernatural force at work in the world it depicts. Or perhaps it is showing us the world as it is experienced by a woman who has lost touch with reality. Meow speculates that she might be on a bad “trip” due to drugs she took before the explosion, or that there is some kind of conspiracy to make her doubt her own identity and sanity. Alex suddenly disappears from the hospital and the woman who calls him agrees to meet Meow at the Koma Shtaim, the nightclub at which the terrorist attack occurred. When Meow arrives, familiar events that already

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happened the night of the explosion are repeated, and Meow gradually comes to believe that a terrorist attack is imminent. She warns those around her, tells them to leave, and goes out herself. At the entrance, she sees the woman she was talking to on the cell phone. It is Meow herself, donning the haircut and clothes she had at the beginning of the film. Meow screams. In the final shot of the film we see her wrapped in bandages and unconscious at the hospital and suffering from severe burns. Perhaps all of the events in the film following the explosion were no more than a dream while she was in a coma.3 The inexplicable, maybe supernatural, events that happened after the explosion all most likely took place merely “inside her head.” In this chapter, I will suggest that the events in the film resonate with the events and sentiments expressed in the film’s paratexts—interviews, reviews, and the DVD commentary.4 I will therefore be referring both to the film and to its accompanying paratexts—and will be reading “Danny Lerner,” the film’s director, as the protagonist of the latter.

Intensified discontinuity In interviews, Lerner said that in his opinion Israeli films were all very much alike and that Israel’s cinema was displaying lack of progress: “either you have a family drama or a family drama with a wedding in the background.”5 Frozen Days, according to him and many of the critics, was trying to break away from this stilted national cinema. Lerner’s understanding of Israeli cinema recalls Joshua Simon’s provocative essay from 2005 “A Certain Tendency of the Israeli Cinema” in which he criticizes Israeli films that rely on film funds and that give primacy to dialogue over all other expressive elements and almost invariably tell the same story about families. Simon argues that the selection of the films that receive funding is based on the submitted screenplay, resulting in a cinema of script-submitting films, not unlike the French “Tradition of Quality” that François Truffaut chastised in 1954.6 The main concerns of the funds are bureaucratic and administrative, not making adventurous cinema. The Israeli funds follow the European film-fund model, a fact that enables coproductions with Europe, but which also ensures that the films, while adding local folklore and supposedly peripheral Others, look and sound professional and proper. In them, the camera is stable and the image is in focus; the soundtrack is clear and the dialogue is easy to comprehend. The result is European-like punctilious films which lack stylistic

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daring or ideological tension. The films are sterile, a-political, standardized, and quiescent; they are politically correct family dramas.7 With its handheld camera, occasional out-of-focus shots, and refrainment from ever mentioning weddings or the protagonist’s family (if she has parents, siblings, children, past or present life partners, they are never seen, heard, or talked about in the film), Frozen Days is clearly trying to break away from the tradition that Lerner finds unprogressive and Simon despises. In numerous aspects it is a film that follows non-Israeli cinematic models. Lerner and many film critics attended to the influence of non-Israeli filmmakers on Frozen Days, notably Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock,8 Brian De Palma,9 and Sam Raimi.10 For example, the film, which opens with a close-up on its protagonist’s eye and follows the experience of a woman who might be losing her mind, alludes to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965).11 Meow flirts with a mysterious man who disappears and whose identity she gradually and involuntarily seems to assume. The man’s name, “Alex Kaplan,” is reminiscent of the nonexistent Kaplan in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959). She believes Alex might be the man in the hospital who is entirely wrapped up in bandages, like an Egyptian mummy, and that there might be a conspiracy to turn her into Alex Kaplan—an allusion to Polanski’s The Tenant (Le locataire, 1976), the protagonist of which similarly believes that the people around him are trying to convert him into the previous tenant of his apartment, whom he sees in the hospital covered in bandages like a mummy.12 Significantly, some of the non-Israeli films to which Frozen Days alludes were made by Hollywood outsiders: not only by the British Hitchcock and European Polanski, but also extreme low-budget indy productions that became cult classics, like Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) and Sam Raimi’s early work. Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) and The Tenant (1976) were both made in Europe although at the time Polanski could still work in the United States. These films perhaps signal a path outside of Hollywood, which Israeli filmmakers can also take. Stylistically the film follows the fashionable American and international form that David Bordwell calls “intensified continuity”: rapid editing, cutting between wide-angle and long-lens (telephoto) extremes, reliance on close shots, and camera movement in many or most shots, including the all-but-obligatory 360-degree tracking shot circling around the protagonist.13 Israeli commentators have noted that despite its budgetary constraints, Frozen Days, unlike many Israeli films, features camera movements and a polished look.14 The attention to visual aspects is also evident in the choice to present most of the film in black

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and white, with the exception of the brief sequence at the nightclub, which ends with the terrorist attack, and which is in color. Lerner claims that he chose to make the film within a genre that he labels the “psychological thriller,” “psychological film,” or “mind film,” which takes place “inside someone’s head,”15 and which others have called “puzzle,” “mind-game,” or “mind-fuck” films,16 like The Game (David Fincher, 1997), Fight Club (Fincher, 1999), American Psycho (Mary Harron, 2000), and Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001), in which we see the world from the subjective point of view of one character, thus, according to Lerner, “undermining our grasp of what is real and what is not.”17 These films, he maintains, enable multiple interpretations, and it is impossible to ever know for sure what exactly happens in them.18 Moreover, Lerner’s goal was not to make yet another standard mind-game film. He wanted to “develop” the genre, which he claimed was very masculine by adding a woman’s point of view;19 and indeed Frozen Days features a female protagonist (Figure 9.2). Lerner however was not trying to sever all ties with Israel in this film. He makes it clear in an interview that for him the film is Israeli—it is in Hebrew, it takes place in Tel Aviv, and it addresses the tension of living with the constant threat of terrorist attacks, which he dubs “our traumas.”20 Lerner, then, was trying to make a film about Israeli experiences (“our traumas”), while also breaking away from the tradition of Israeli family dramas by making a mind-game film, and developing the mind-game genre by breaking away from its masculine

Figure 9.2 Frozen Days (Danny Lerner, 2006) attempts to create an Israeli mind-game film from a woman’s point of view.

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characteristics. In an interview he said that “suddenly all of these things came together in my head: the mind-game film, dealing with the effects of terrorist attacks, and the desire to place a woman at the center of the story.”21 As Thomas Elsaesser notes, mind-game films often feature psychopathologies which are connected to a traumatic incident that keeps returning,22 and it seems that Frozen Days uses local traumas as a way of accessing a popular Hollywood genre. It draws on mind-game films in order to represent the Israeli trauma of witnessing and living with recurrent terrorism. Andrew Higson has defined three areas for examining the cultural identity of national cinema: the content or subject matter of the body of films; the sensibility, structure of feeling, or worldview expressed in the films; and the style and formal systems, modes of address, and construction of subjectivity.23 In the case of Frozen Days, we can say that the subject matter (the local or national trauma of living with recurrent terrorism) and the formal system (the Hollywood mind-game genre) exhibit many similar sensibilities, structures of feeling, and worldviews, thus enabling the film to use its local subject matter to access a global formal system. For example, the film’s complex narrative, which does not view the world as a causal linear chain of individual-driven events, can be explained both as part of the genre and as a depiction of post-traumatic pathologies. As already noted, the film does not follow a clear trajectory, but rather consists of confusing variations on events that are inexplicably repeated, such as the client who repeatedly asks for free samples of the drugs and the next-door neighbor who repeatedly invites Meow to tenants’ meetings. At the end, the night of the explosion apparently takes place again, suggesting some kind of temporal loop in which Meow has perhaps traveled back in time; or has traveled back in time and has become a different person—Alex Kaplan; or in which events in the club are mysteriously repeated. Some occurrences do not make causal sense, such as Alex’s disappearance from the hospital, or Meow’s sudden changes in appearance. These narrative attributes are characteristic of mind-game films which do not seem to conform to classical individual-driven causal linear narratives and offer various narratological problems or puzzles such as nonlinear sequence, inverted causality, multiple time-lines, narrative loops or Möbius strips, and retroactive revisions and reorganizations.24 This complex, nonlinear, narrative can also be explained as reflecting the experience of having undergone psychological trauma. According to the entry for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,25 one of the criteria for diagnosing PTSD is that the traumatic event is persistently

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reexperienced or relived, for example in images, thoughts, or perceptions, illusions, hallucinations, and dissociative flashbacks.26 This would suggest that the experience of people who suffer from PTSD would also be nonlinear, with persistent intrusions from the same traumatic event from the past, which is therefore experienced repetitively, in what could be aptly labeled as “frozen” time. Admittedly, the repetition in the film is not limited to the traumatic explosion, but post-traumatic symptoms can include persistent behavior or thoughts that are not only of the traumatic event. An additional diagnostic criterion of PTSD is persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma.27 Furthermore, when drawing an analogy between “traumatic amnesia” and the choice of the object which will be instituted as a fetish,28 Freud explains that the subject’s interest “comes to a halt half-way, as it were” in a process of “the stopping of memory,” so that as a fetish what is retained is “the last impression before the uncanny and traumatic one,”29 suggesting that it is exactly the events prior to the terrorist attack which would be retained in memory or fixated upon. Additionally, the sensibility, structure of feeling, or worldview in the film can be characterized as one of alienation and inability to forge intimate contacts with others. From the very start Meow seems reluctant to trust anyone. She never reveals her name, her only face-to-face meeting with Alex is in the dark, she rebuffs a man who wants to have a drink with her at the club, and prefers to dance alone. After the explosion her alienation from others grows stronger. The only person she apparently confides in is an unconscious man in the hospital whose face she has never seen, whose identity is uncertain, and who disappears. Her distrust seems to turn into outright paranoia, as she begins to experience all attempts to approach her as part of a plot to make her doubt her own identity and turn her into Alex Kaplan. Alex’s next-door neighbor, the other security guards at the mall, the police officers who find her stolen moped, and even a good friend she turns to at the end all address her as “Alex.” Like the complex narrative, this suspicion and alienation can be accounted for both in reference to the mind-game genre and to PTSD. Paranoia is one of the major types of psychopathology which mind-game films tend to revolve around.30 The PTSD diagnosis includes persistent symptoms of anxiety31 and hypervigilance.32 Symptoms include a feeling of detachment or estrangement from others, lacking the ability to have loving feelings,33 and a reduced ability to feel emotions, especially those associated with intimacy, tenderness, and sexuality.34 The paranoia and alienated protagonist of the film are an additional meeting place for the local subject matter and Hollywood formal system. Thanks to “our

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traumas” the mind-game thriller is one Hollywood genre that Israeli filmmakers are entitled to use by right.

Family romances But true to the mind-game genre as Lerner sees it, are we sure this is indeed what happens in the film? Has he really escaped the Israeli family drama or the gender conventions of the mind-game film? Some of Lerner’s comments are best understood as ironic. Additionally, the DVD commentary includes segments that are clearly preplanned and fictional, as when Lerner promises that he will now finally reveal his interpretation of this enigmatic film to the other participants in the recording of the commentary, which is interrupted by white noise in the soundtrack whenever Lerner supposedly elucidates a particularly enigmatic plot point and wins the accolades of the other participants. This suggests that “Lerner” is merely an additional character in an additional fictional text, the DVD commentary of Frozen Days. The flesh-and-blood Danny Lerner does not coincide with the protagonist of the paratexts I have been dealing with. But then how are we to understand his comments about “our traumas” and the mind-game film? Lerner’s assertion that he wanted to “develop” the mind-game film by adding a female protagonist for example is a howler that suggests his claims were done tongue in cheek and that his story of breaking away from Israeli cinema need not be taken at face value. In fact, thrillers that depict the world from the subjective point of view of a female protagonist who has become disoriented, possibly encountering supernatural events or losing her mind, are hardly rare. They include the female gothic films or “paranoid woman’s films” of the 1940s and their substantial progeny, in which a woman typically tried to discover the truth about her husband, while she, and the film which depicted the world from her point of view, were not entirely certain whether they could trust their senses, sanity, and interpretation of reality.35 These are far from obscure and include some extremely well-known classics, auteur pictures, and significant star vehicles, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), Suspicion (1941), and Under Capricorn (1949); Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and Experiment Perilous (1944); George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944); The Spiral Staircase (Robert Siodmak, 1946), Dragonwyck (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946), Vincent Minnelli’s Undercurrent (1946), Fritz Lang’s Secret beyond the Door (1947), The

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Two Mrs. Carrolls (Peter Godfrey, 1947), and Max Ophuls’s Caught (1949). Later examples include Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Alejandro Amenábar’s exemplary mind-game film The Others (2001). Hitchcock, Polanski, contemporary mind-game films, and earlier psychological thrillers were never shy about placing a woman at the center of the narrative and adhering to her point of view, especially when her sanity was in doubt. Moreover, Lerner’s own protagonist lacks a clear gender identity, and seems to gradually turn into Alex Kaplan, the man she meets early on in the film (Figure 9.3). And even this gender-bending is not really unprecedented in the work of the filmmakers Lerner mentions, such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), The Tenant, and Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980). In this aspect, Lerner was obviously unable to break away from past traditions, and his perhaps ironic claim to have “developed” the genre further by including a female protagonist only draws attention to his inability to do so. Moreover, by declaring that his film is an attempt to evade the conventional Israeli family drama, he inevitably placed it within an oedipal drama, a Freudian “Family Romance,”36 fueled not so much by the anxiety aroused by recurrent terrorist attacks as by the anxiety of influence. Lerner, in his first feature film, makes an effort to clear a space for himself within Israeli cinema by swerving away from his predecessors. Unlike Harold Bloom’s strong poet, he does not do so through a misreading or misprision as a corrective movement of his predecessors,37 but rather, like Freud’s child in the “Family Romance” Bloom

Figure 9.3 The protagonist of Frozen Days (Danny Lerner, 2006) finds herself trapped in another person’s identity and gender.

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frequently refers to, dreams of “getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others, who, as a rule, are of higher social standing”38—in this case the cinematic aristocracy of Roman Polanski and Alfred Hitchcock. Freud reassures his readers that the child’s “faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent” and that the “new and aristocratic parents” in the child’s phantasy are derived entirely from the real ones.39 Similarly, it seems that Lerner’s orotund declaration of independence from Israeli family dramas ended up composing an oedipal Israeli family drama in the very making of his film and its paratexts. Moreover the means by which he chose to rebel against his cinematic fathers— transferring an international model into Israeli cinema—is in fact one of the oldest traditions in the history of Israeli and Zionist motion pictures, which have always tended to borrow models from other nations: Soviet, French, Italian, Egyptian, and American cinema have been obvious sources in Israeli films.40 In turning to an international genre, Lerner in fact joined the Israeli tradition of being influenced, an outright local epidemic—“influenza,” to borrow Bloom’s term.41 Lerner’s attempt to swerve away from his Israeli cinematic fathers’ cinema and to clear a space for himself ended up trapping him in a different aspect of the very same tradition from which he tried to flee, and, on a different textual level, creating a family drama, the very genre that he was trying to avoid. This failure is not surprising. Both Lerner’s and Simon’s critiques of Israeli cinema as limited to family dramas are somewhat parochial. They focus on traits of Israeli films and their funding, at most acknowledging similarities to European cinema, or that the current modes of funding in Israeli make coproductions with Europe possible. In fact, aesthetically unadventurous films about families, with or without a wedding in the background, are a staple of “world cinema,” and are far from being unique to Israeli films. While a major trend within scholarship on Israeli cinema has been to place the films within Israeli, Jewish, Zionist, and Palestinian societies, cultures, politics, and histories, contemporary Israeli cinema can also be viewed as another case of world cinema. As Thomas Elsaesser notes, in addition to the Hollywood commercial industry (and other commercial cinemas, like Bollywood), there is a second global distribution system—the network of international film festivals.42 It is here that many world-cinema films find funding and an audience. Some festivals offer production funds, development money, or organize a talent campus.43 The festivals hold a “clearing house function” for distributors of minority interest films that have attracted critical plaudits or prizes at festivals,44

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and “act collectively as a distribution system [. . . ] effectively select[ing] each year which films will fill the few slots that art-house cinemas or the dedicated screens of the multiplexes keep open for the minority interest cinema.”45 Films can gather the cultural capital and critical prowess necessary for further exhibition through their success in the international festival circuit, so that “[n]o poster of an independent film can do without the logo of one of the world’s prime festivals, as prominently displayed as Hollywood productions carry their studio logo.”46 With few exceptions, Israeli films belong to this category of world-cinema festival films. The films not only ape European conventions, but also rely on its funding. Many Israeli films, like other cases of world cinema, are in fact transnational coproductions, dependent not only on local film funds and regulation which ensures investments by Israeli television channels, but also on European coproduction funds and presales to channels like the Franco-German ARTE. In 2009, foreign investments in Israeli films almost equaled that of the Israeli Film Fund (the former was $4,336,250 and amounted to 34.3% of film financing sources, whereas the latter was $4,735,000 and amounted to 37.5%).47 Moreover, Israeli film culture is largely oriented toward Hollywood and Israeli viewers generally flock to the same blockbusters and Hollywood films as their peers throughout the globe, with local productions gaining substantially less viewers. For example, the box-office leader in admissions for 2010 in Israel was Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) and for 2009 was Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (Carlos Saldanha and Mike Thurmeier, 2009).48 Israeli and world-cinema films in general are not necessarily viewed by filmgoers in the country or region which they supposedly “represent.” In some cases the films do arouse interest among domestic viewers, sometimes only after their success in international festivals and awards, and are relatively successful at the Israeli box-office; in other cases, the films are negligible in the domestic market, and/or are derided by local critics, who sometimes disparage them for being simplistic and superficial “festival films.”49 World-cinema films, then, are specifically catered to meet the needs of the festival circuit and foreign viewers, not local film culture. Formally, Elsaesser characterizes world-cinema films, which target the marketplace of art houses and dedicated screens in multiplexes, as “art cinema ‘light.’ ” In their treatment of time and space the films are closer to the mainstream than to experimental, avant-garde, or third cinema.50 Elsaesser notes world cinema’s attention to globalization and to the uniqueness of national and sub-national identities, precisely because these films address a global audience, and not the “local” constituency they portray. Addressing audiences in film

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festivals, art houses, and multiplexes, and at times garnering little interest from viewers in the country or region the films “represent,” world cinema is often driven by an “ethnographic outlook” and takes place in an act of “self-othering” or “self-exoticization,” in which, according to Elsaesser, “the ethnic, the local or the regional expose themselves, under the guise of self-expression, to the gaze of the benevolent other.”51 Questions of “underdevelopment, exclusion, racism, genocide, poverty, and of the clash between traditional ways of life and the impact of globalization, modernity, and Western habits or lifestyles” play a major role in world cinema, as do, among others, “the constructions of gender and ethnicity, family values and religion,[. . . ] and the role/oppression of women in traditional societies.”52 What Lerner and Simon criticize as a certain tendency of Israeli films (focusing almost exclusively on families and functioning within a narrow range of aesthetic options) can be recast as a symptom of belonging to world cinema within the distribution and funding system of film festivals and film funds. Trying to make a film that deviates from the standard Israeli family drama is, in other words, an attempt to break free from the provenance of world cinema and film-fund and festival films and to find a point of entry into the other system, that of commercial cinema, particularly in this case Hollywood.53 Moreover, Lerner’s desire to “develop” the genre suggests that he wants not only to copy it and transfer it into Israeli cinema, but also to significantly alter it; influence the way in which David Fincher, M. Night Shyamalan, and Roman Polanski will make films in the future. This is extremely unlikely. Successful commercial exhibition of a Hollywood genre film depends on distribution by the international media conglomerates that own the major Hollywood studios. The market is saturated with their productions and the presence of foreign-language films in it is negligible. The conglomerates do occasionally remake foreign films or allow workers from abroad to join their ranks, sometimes in significant creative positions (such as producers Arnon Milchan and Avi Arad and cinematographer Adam Greenberg), and they are always happy to receive international capital for their films (Israel Discount Bank is part of a group that financed DreamWorks Studios, for example).54 But they do not as a rule pick up foreign-language films for major blockbuster marketing and distribution.55 The most a film like Frozen Days can hope for is independent distribution or distribution by a “specialty” or “classics” division within a major that deals with foreign films, which would still relegate it to the second network of film festivals, art houses, and the few dedicated multiplex screens; yet this too

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is unlikely since Frozen Days rejects the world-cinema festival-film formula—it does not want to be a family drama—which currently offers the best prospective for an Israeli film to gain distribution. Making a successful Hollywood genre film within Israeli cinema is unlikely not because of local tastes, lack of talent, or the pigheadedness of Israeli film funds, but because of the global position of Israeli cinema. Altering it requires changing the world. No wonder that Lerner’s claims to have done so can easily be understood as ironic.

A double horror Many films have been read as commentaries on their medium, its reception, filmmaking, and filmmakers. According to film scholars, early cinema’s trick films by Méliès and others can be read as incorporating responses to films at the period and therefore as being “about the cinema itself and the phenomenological fear embedded in its reception.”56 Similarly, Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) can be read as incorporating responses to Hollywood’s transition to sound films in the late 1920s and early 1930s.57 Nosferatu (Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, F. W. Murnau, 1922) poses “fundamental questions of cinematic representation”58 and the body of its vampire, who is “a phantom created by film technology,”59 is “rendered immaterial and phantomic qua film.”60 And George Lucas negotiated his destiny of making Star Wars films and not 1970s New Hollywood films within the plot of the The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980).61 It almost seems obvious that films might express, perhaps allegorically or metonymically, concerns that have to do with films. Israeli cinema however is often interpreted symptomatically as reflecting, contributing to, or challenging Jewish, Israeli, and Palestinian society at large.62 Scholarship exposes the contradictions, structuring absences, and silences in the films in relation to these societies; and explains the collective traumas, memories, and fantasies of the peoples which are shown in the films. In contrast, I would like to offer a reading of Frozen Days in the context of its making. I have argued that Lerner’s comments in the paratexts can be read in two ways. According to one, the similarities in worldviews between the local subject matter and the Hollywood formal system allowed him access, as an Israeli filmmaker, to a global genre, which he could now take up and even alter. According to the other reading, these comments should be read as ironic. They indicate his awareness of the almost certain failure of his aspirations to make an Israeli film

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that will be distributed by the international media conglomerates that own the major Hollywood studios. I would like to suggest that this is the worldview or sensitivity that is reflected in the film. While Frozen Days no doubt can be read as portraying the traumas of Israelis living under the constant threat of terrorist attacks, and even as a political parable of sorts,63 it can also be understood as conveying its creators’ predicament: trying to make a Hollywood genre film when confined to the status of world cinema; that is, a doomed attempt to break out of one’s current identity and tradition and to adopt a new one. Indeed, a recurrent theme of the film is precisely its protagonist’s attempt to live within, or alongside, a world in which she does not quite fit in. The terrorist attack divides the film into two parts. Before the explosion, Meow is portrayed as a self-confident, feisty young woman who is reluctant to expose herself or display any weakness and sometimes prefers to be alone and distant. She is not at home in her surroundings and is often literally moving, usually running, and without a clear identity: she never reveals her name and lacks a permanent address as far as we know. She insists on doing things on her own terms and is cautious about letting Alex into her life or succumbing to the advances of another man at the club. Although she is at times playful, the world around her is experienced as hostile and dangerous and seems to justify her reluctance to let her guard down. Her contact with other people is often violent and unhappy: her moped is stolen, a client forces her to give him free “samples,” she is caught breaking into an apartment she thought was empty, and she discovers that the security guard she is flirting with is not Alex as she had originally thought and he tries to stop her. Her attempt to finally meet Alex at the club ends with a terrorist attack. Not only does the film create a world in which there are no families or weddings, but it also depicts an environment that is experienced as alien and hostile to the justifiably guarded and aloof protagonist who cannot find a stable identity or settle down within it. After the attack, when the film most likely takes place only inside her head, these events are repeated and to a certain extent “corrected” or “mastered.”64 She breaks into Alex’s apartment, but when caught is misrecognized as the legal tenant. She violently takes back the money the client owes her for the “samples.” The police find her stolen moped. It turns out that Alex really is a security guard at the mall as she initially thought. Instead of buzzing each apartment at Alex’s building to see in which one he lives as she had done before the terrorist attack, she is invited to attend a tenants’ meeting. She finally has a place to live, a (legal and legitimate) job, a name, and an identity. She is embraced by her

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surroundings. And she finds all of this horrifying. She begins to suspect that there is a conspiracy to impose someone else’s identity upon her, to make her into the moribund man in the hospital, who cannot move and whom she does not want to be. Her self-confidence and sense of identity are shattered. She is in a mind-game film. Read alongside with the film’s paratexts, it is possible to suggest that it is the experience and fears of making a Hollywood genre film in Israel that are echoed in the film’s sensibility and its protagonist’s difficulties in finding her place in the world. Up to the explosion, the film offers us the possibility of maintaining one’s distance from one’s surroundings which resonates with the filmmakers’ wish to blaze a trail within Israeli cinema and to break away from its traditions and surroundings but still make the film Israeli. Meow can live and love on her own terms, remain alone when she chooses, or flirt if she likes. It is a dangerous and sometimes lonely choice, but a possible one, which corresponds to Lerner’s belief that he can make his own sort of films as an Israeli. It is the terrorist attack, “our traumas,” which according to Lerner is one of the elements that make the film Israeli, which puts an end to this option. It introduces the nightmare of failing to escape one’s surroundings. While it is difficult to discern a linear cause-and-effect plot in this part of the film, it does include two affective components that are relevant to Lerner’s comments about his position within Israeli cinema. One is the feeling that a preexisting identity, that of “Alex Kaplan,” who works at the local mall and has an address and a name, is being forced upon the protagonist by her friends and neighbors. The second is a feeling of being confined to an identity she cannot flee from. It reaches an extreme at the end, when she tries to meet the other woman who calls Alex, and discovers that she is her double. She is trapped in her own identity, basically talking to herself, and unable to change or escape from it. In the film, this double nightmare is somewhat contradictory: on the one hand she feels that someone else’s identity is being forced upon her from without and on the other hand she is horrified to learn that she is trapped within her own identity and that others—Alex and the woman on the phone—are her own doubles. Yet in Lerner’s paratexts this double horror can cohere. While wanting to make films as an Israeli he also feels a strong affinity to the mind-game film which he and others view as non-Israeli. If he were to fail—which as we have seen is quite likely—and forced to make typical Israeli family dramas, it would both be alien to his own preferences and trapping him in his identity as an Israeli. The horror of having an alien identity forced upon the protagonist and of not being able to

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escape her own identity thus resonates with the possibility of not succeeding in the attempt to escape the confines of his own identity as an Israeli filmmaker and the history of Israeli cinema, which he experiences, according to the paratexts, as an esthetically and thematically stifling cinematic tradition. In other words, it is the threat of becoming yet another mummified double and only seeing reflections of himself as an Israeli filmmaker instead of becoming an other, a filmmaker on a par with Hollywood’s aristocracy. While the film initially introduces the option of living in Tel Aviv while remaining detached, which echoes Lerner’s desire to make films in a non-Israeli genre in Israel, the explosion introduces a good dose of Israeli reality which neither the film’s protagonist nor its makers can escape. This however is most likely only the dream of the unconscious protagonist, so it is unclear whether it indeed reflects the harsh reality in which Lerner’s aspiration is likely to fail. Moreover, if the fear of failing to make a Hollywood genre film in a global situation that only wants family dramas from him is experienced as something of a mind-game horror story, it only further validates his affinity with the mind-game film, thus becoming, alongside the threat of terrorism, an additional factor that validates his access to the genre. The very possibility that he might fail to use “our traumas” to escape the confines of Israeli cinema is also exactly what will allow him to broaden the range of experiences that Israeli filmmakers can have access to in their films in order to escape Israeli cinema’s tradition. A veritable mind-game film.

Notes I am grateful to Doron Galili for his extremely helpful insights and comments. 1 Pablo Utin, The New Israeli Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008), 230. 2 The name therefore alludes to the existence of a second level or layer and to being in a coma—both relevant to the film. 3 It is difficult to say with certainty what exactly happens in the film, since she dreams of a man wrapped in bandages before the explosion takes place. Was the terrorist attack, then, also part of her dream or of a hallucination that perhaps spans the entire film? Is the closing shot “reality”? Is she psychic and was she dreaming the future? Is it merely a coincidence that she dreamt of the man wrapped in bandages? 4 My use of the term “paratext” is taken from the interpretation of Gerard Genette’s work in Robert Stam, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, New

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Deeper than Oblivion Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 207–8. Utin, New Israeli Cinema, 229. All translations from Hebrew mine. See François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, vol. 1, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 224–37. Yehoshu’a Simon, “A Certain Tendency in the Israeli Cinema: The Aesthetics of ‘Fund Films,’ an International Movement of Peripheral Mainstream,” Ma’arvon [in Hebrew] 1 (Winter 2005–6): 6–11. An English translation of the article is also available, Joshua Simon, “A Certain Tendency in Israeli Cinema,” Seconds 5 (2007), www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/001/articles/jsimon/index.php. Uri Klein, “What Did Meow Do?” Ha’aretz [in Hebrew], October 27, 2005, www. haaretz.co.il/gallery/1.1052829. Shmulik Duvdevani, “Against All Odds,” Ynet [in Hebrew], August 24, 2006, www. ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3295169,00.html. Filmmakers’ commentary on the film’s DVD. Lerner mentions Repulsion as a source of inspiration in an interview, Nimrod Kemer, “Hot and Stressful,” Walla [in Hebrew], August 24, 2006, http://e.walla. co.il/?w=/200/963977. The connection between this film and The Tenant as well as Repulsion is mentioned in Duvdevani, “Against All Odds”; Klein “What Did Meow Do?”; and Uri Klein “The Female Tenant,” Ha’aretz [in Hebrew], August 25, 2006, www.haaretz.co.il/ misc/1.1131472. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 121–89. Utin, New Israeli Cinema, 232; on the significance of the visual elements in the film, see also Utin, New Israeli Cinema, 242. Israeli film critic Uri Klein also mentions the impressive cinematography in the film (Klein, “What Did Meow Do?”), and praises its cinematographer (Klein, “The Female Tenant”). Utin, New Israeli Cinema, 227. Jonathan Eig, “A Beautiful Mind(fuck): Hollywood Structures of Identity,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 46 (2003), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ jc46.2003/eig.mindfilms/text.html; Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It, 72–103; Thomas Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 13–41. Utin, New Israeli Cinema, 227. Utin, New Israeli Cinema, 239–40 and Kemer, “Hot and Stressful.” Utin, New Israeli Cinema, 228.

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Kemer, “Hot and Stressful.” Utin, New Israeli Cinema, 228. Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” 26. Andrew Higson, “The Concept of National Cinema,” Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 43. Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” 21. American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision, DSM-IV-TR (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), s.v. “309.81 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Ibid., Criterion B. Ibid., Criterion C. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–74), 21:147–58. Ibid., 154. Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” 24, 25–6. American Psychiatric Association, “309.81 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.” Ibid., Criterion D (4). Ibid., Criterion C (5) and (6). Ibid. Elsaesser, “The Mind-Game Film,” 25. On these films, see also Diane Waldman, “ ‘At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!’: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s,” Cinema Journal 23, no. 2 (Winter, 1984): 29–40; Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Helen Hanson, Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Annette Kuhn, “Woman’s Pictures,” in Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, vol. 4, ed. Barry Keith Grant (New York: Schirmer Reference, 2007), 367–73. See Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” in Standard Edition, 9:235–42. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Second edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 14. For further discussion of Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” see: Chris Baldick, The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), s.v. “Anxiety of Influence”; Ian Buchanan, A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “Anxiety of Influence,” www.oxfordreference. com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t306.e38. Freud, “Family Romances,” 237–8. Ibid., 239. See Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1993); Rachel Weissbrod, Not by Word Alone:

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Deeper than Oblivion Fundamental Issues in Translation [in Hebrew] (Ra’anana: The Open University of Israel, 2007), 239–51. Cf. Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, 38 and 85. Which is not to imply that Hollywood or other commercial cinemas do not enjoy state protection and subsidies; that festivals ignore Hollywood or are not used by it as trade shows; or that no profits are involved in “festival films.” Thomas Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), 88. Ibid., 504. Ibid., 91. Ibid., 87. “Film Financing Sources 2009” in “General Outline,” The Israel Film Fund website, www.filmfund.org.il/userfiles/file/fund%20information%202010.pdf. Limiting 2010 box-office figures to films released that year, of the ten box-office leaders in admissions released in 2010, eight were not Israeli films; see Ya’ir Raveh, Cinemascope, December 31, 2010, http://blog.orange.co.il/cinemascope/?p=5769. In 2009, Ice Age was followed by Up (Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, 2009) in leading the charts in Israeli movie theaters, with only one Israeli film reaching the top ten (Raveh, Cinemascope, December 26, 2009, http://blog.orange.co.il/ cinemascope/?p=3046). Figures are for admissions and not grosses, which Israeli distributors do not make public. Ticket prices for 3D films are higher, and it is therefore likely that Israeli films, none of which were released in 3D, would not have ranked higher had the figures been for grosses rather than admissions. On the negative reception in Israel of one such film, see Boaz Hagin, “Male Weeping as Performative: The Crying Mossad Assassin in Walk on Water,” Camera Obscura 68 (2008): 103–39, esp. 105–7. Elsaesser, European Cinema, 509. Ibid., 510. Ibid., 509. In addition, Elsaesser discerns the festivals’ interest in topical areas and international hotspots (504), a position which Israel-Palestine has been filling for many years. The Israeli films that have scored significant success in world markets seem to bear out Elsaesser’s account. They very frequently deal with topical and political issues in the region or in Israeli society—notably the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wars, and the Holocaust and its aftermath which seem to be perennially topical in the Academy Awards and in European film festivals—and self-exoticize conflicts that have to do with ethnic and familial identities (such as Georgian Jews in Dover Koshashvili’s Late Marriage [2001] and Gift from Above [2003]), or with communities that resist Westernization, such as ultraorthodox Jews (Ushpizin [Giddi Dar, 2004] and My Father, My Lord [David Volach, 2007]). They offer to Western viewers images already familiar from the news and clichés of Orientalist

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fantasies about Middle-Eastern villages and violence and of Jewish life modeled on European Hassidic communities and Holocaust imagery. To take Israeli films that received a nomination for an Academy Award in the best foreign language film category, Ajami (Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, nominated in the 2010 awards) depicts Jewish-Arab violence and conflicts; Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, nominated in the 2009 awards) deals with the traumatic memories of Israeli soldiers during the First Lebanon War including the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps and a reference to the Holocaust; and Beaufort (Joseph Cedar, nominated in the 2008 awards) tells of the evacuation of an Israeli post at the end of the First Lebanon War. For a discussion of a different group of Israeli films in this context of world cinema, see Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef, “Festival Exoticism: The Israeli Queer Film in a Global Context,” GLQ 18, no. 1 (2012): 161–78. Alan Duke, “Spielberg Gets Movie Cash with India Partnership,” August 17, 2009, CNN Entertainment, http://articles.cnn.com/2009–08–17/entertainment/spielberg. bollywood_1_stacey-snider-california-bank-trust-independent-studio?_s=PM: SHOWBIZ. For an extremely critical analysis of the dominance of the media conglomerates on world entertainment, see Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 5. For additional examples of such textual incorporation of the experience of reception in film scripts, see 105–6 and 113. Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 125. Ibid., 105. Ibid., 126. Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 424. The locus classicus for such readings is Ella Shohat, “Master Narrative/Counter Readings: The Politics of Israeli Cinema,” in Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History, ed. Robert Sklar and Charles Musser (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 251–78. I discuss the ethical and political ramifications of the film and some of its paratexts in “The Psychological Thriller and the Family Drama: On Ethics and Terrorism in Frozen Days (2006),” Mikkan [in Hebrew] (forthcoming).

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64 One of the options that Freud suggests for explaining why patients who have undergone trauma frequently dream of the situation in which the trauma occurred and which gives them no pleasure is an attempt “to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Standard Edition, 18:31).

Bibliography American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Fourth edition, Text Revision, DSM-IV-TR. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. Baldick, Chris. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex ‘n’ Drugs ‘n’ Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. London: Bloomsbury, 1999. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Second edition. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Buchanan, Ian. A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Eig, Jonathan. “A Beautiful Mind(fuck): Hollywood Structures of Identity.” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 46 (2003), www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc46.2003/eig. mindfilms/text.html. Elsaesser, Thomas. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. —. “The Mind-Game Film.” In Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, edited by Warren Buckland, 13–41. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Freud, Sigmund. “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, 18:1–64. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–74. —. “Family Romances.” In Standard Edition, 9:235–42. —. “Fetishism.” In Standard Edition, 21:147–58. Gertz, Nurith. Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1993. Hagin, Boaz. “The Psychological Thriller and the Family Drama: On Ethics and Terrorism in Frozen Days (2006),” Mikkan [in Hebrew] (forthcoming).

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Hagin, Boaz and Raz Yosef. “Festival Exoticism: The Israeli Queer Film in a Global Context.” GLQ 18, no. 1 (2012): 161–78. Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Higson, Andrew. “The Concept of National Cinema.” Screen 30, no. 4 (1989): 36–47. Kaes, Anton. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Kuhn, Annette. “Woman’s Pictures.” In Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, vol. 4, edited by Barry Keith Grant, 367–73. New York: Schirmer Reference, 2007. Miller, Toby, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang. Global Hollywood 2. London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Shohat, Ella. “Master Narrative/Counter Readings: The Politics of Israeli Cinema.” In Resisting Images: Essays on Cinema and History, edited by Robert Sklar and Charles Musser, 251–78. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990. Simon, Yehoshu’a. “A Certain Tendency in the Israeli Cinema: The Aesthetics of ‘Fund Films,’ an International Movement of Peripheral Mainstream.” Ma’arvon [in Hebrew] 1 (Winter 2005–6): 6–11. Spadoni, Robert. Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Stam, Robert, Robert Burgoyne, and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Truffaut, François. “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema.” In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, vol. 1, edited by Bill Nichols, 224–37. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Tsivian, Yuri. Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception. Translated by Alan Bodger. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Utin, Pablo. The New Israeli Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008). Waldman, Diane. “ ‘At Last I Can Tell It to Someone!’: Feminine Point of View and Subjectivity in the Gothic Romance Film of the 1940s.” Cinema Journal 23, no. 2 (Winter, 1984): 29–40. Weissbrod, Rachel. Not by Word Alone: Fundamental Issues in Translation [in Hebrew]. Ra’anana: The Open University of Israel, 2007.

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History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni

In this essay, we draw on the trends that link together critical theory of culture, mainly that engaging with national identity and narratives, with psychoanalytical-Freudian theory of the subject, in order to explore the concept of trauma. Through that concept, we examine what has not been told and has been excluded from Israel’s national identity and history. Following Freud and subsequent theorists of trauma,1 we will consider a situation of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as one in which the original traumatic event has not been assimilated into the mind’s sequence of events from the past. It nevertheless surfaces later, after what Freud termed latency period—in the present, in a manner which does not allow it to be identified. It is an event signified by other signifiers that cloaks itself in an assortment of costumes and appearances, thus making it impossible for a linear-causal, coherent narrative to take shape. In other words, the trauma is such a terrible and difficult event that it is not grasped in the consciousness. Since it is not assimilated into a continuous causal narrative and cannot be depicted in terms borrowed from a familiar narrative, it does not communicate with previous knowledge, neither is it subsumed into a causal chain leading toward the future. Though it ostensibly leaves no traces, it exists as a repressed memory. And as Freud showed, the repressed will return after a period of silencing: it disturbs and damages the possibility for experiencing the present or molding it into a causal sequence. Ultimately the trauma remains a living, unchanged, and extant event, as if wholly present but not represented in memory. One can therefore argue that certain events excluded from the narrative of national identity may be suspected as traumatic ones, if they are threatening and undermining its integrity and

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validity. As such, they cannot be organized within the historical past that led to and shaped the present, and hence the impossibility of relating the chronological history of events as rational cause and effect and as directionality of action.2 On the other hand, the possibility of overcoming the trauma is tied to the integration and assimilation of the events, the option for working them through, and thus to relate the history. In a place where one can narrate, with the presence of a narrative and a listener, we can process and cope with the harrowing events.3 Working-through entails the option for relating the trauma and organizing it into a continuum of events. According to Freud, trauma is not an isolated event—it is inevitably linked to other traumas that preceded or followed it. So the traumatic memory has a chain-like structure, and an “overt” trauma may be revealed as symptomatic of another, “concealed” one. Freud maintains that digging down into the abysses of the mind should not cease once the traumatic event comes to light, for it should be considered as signifying a different trauma, expressed in it.4 Since cinema is simultaneously both narrative medium and the product of a given culture, it is broadly assumed that it can serve as a symptom of that cultural condition capable of telling its story in a variety of ways. Addressing films in accordance with the trauma model thus makes it possible to extricate from them—and the culture that created them—not only what they “reveal,” but also what they persist in concealing and repressing. Discussing Hollywood cinema, Thomas Elsaesser5 is drawing on Freud’s distinctions and describes what he calls the three “core traumas” that recur in various forms in contemporary American cinema, and that underlie the chain of traumas that preceded and followed them. Elsaesser holds that “it is not a question of single events that by chance occurred in American history, but substantive qualities that are connected to the very forming of American society, to its core. . . . Difficult problems that still beset American society in the present. . . . Those traumas are the trauma of the failed melting-pot or the enemy within; the trauma of race; and the trauma of an empire in spite of itself.”6 In this essay we adopt Elsaesser’s distinctions and try to locate the pivotal core trauma of Israeli society. In its earliest years, it was chiefly the trauma of the Holocaust; in later years, it became the continuing trauma of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the recurring wars sparked off by it. Examining Israeli films in the light of the trauma model enables an analysis of those two traumas and, in the process, the discovery of what Israeli films (as well as Israeli culture that produced them) disclose, and what they stubbornly conceal and repress.

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Ostensibly, Israeli films deal openly and straightforwardly with the dual traumas of the Holocaust and the wars, organize them into a narrative with a coherent continuation that extends beyond the traumatic to the present and future, and thus work-through the trauma, making it possible to overcome it. Nevertheless, though the stories of the Holocaust and the war have been told, worked-through, and shaped into a causal chain, they remain like an unhealed wound, a trauma that has not been worked-through. We will argue that the intertwining of the Holocaust’s trauma with those of Israel’s wars— most particularly, the 1948 war—make it impossible to work them through, and thus come to terms with them: We will attempt to show how the events of the Holocaust that remain hidden beneath and beyond the trauma of the war actually hinder the working-through of the trauma of that war and render it impossible to overcome and, conversely, how the inability to work-through the trauma of the war leaves the Holocaust’s open wound unhealed.7 Our argument is that although the trauma of the Holocaust has ostensibly been discussed in films, as well as in the Israeli public discourse, it was principally discussed as a narrative with a fissured, post-traumatic structure: in Freudian-La Caprian terms, it has been used more as an expression of acting-out than of working-through. This is because, despite its chrono-historic primacy, the trauma of the Holocaust actually conceals a later and more deeply repressed one—the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel in 1948. That “later” trauma subverts one of the Zionist narrative’s foundation stones—the identity of the Zionist subject as an eternal victim of injustice, an identity that awards stronger validity to the entire Zionist project. The event of the expulsion mixes matters up and undermines the Jewish victim’s identity; thus it rules out the working-through of the trauma of the Holocaust, which preceded it chronologically. Could it be the case, though, that a former traumatic event conceals and obscures a later one? In this sense, we hope to broaden Freud’s contention regarding the traumatic concatenation. If indeed the concept of “collective unconscious” is a valid one, there is no reason why it should not function as the subject’s unconscious. That is, as a “space” devoid of “time,” as the deterritorialization of history. As Freud himself argued: “The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e., they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference to time is bound up, once again, in the work of the system Cs.”8 We argue that whereas the trauma of loss in the 1948 war (as 1% of the whole population was killed—one-fifth of the fighting force) rekindled the old trauma

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of the Jewish victim and found its solution in a story extending from Holocaust to heroism and victory, the trauma of the expulsion undercut a foundation-stone of the Zionist narrative—the identity of the Jewish subject as a continuing victim of injustice, an identity that imbued the entire Zionist project with validity.9 The victim’s transformation into a perpetrator is a traumatic event that subverts the Zionist endeavor, which might have enabled the Holocaust trauma to be coped with and worked-through.10 To establish this, we first position the Israeli films dealing with the Holocaust as possessing a post-traumatic structure, and then demonstrate how the traces of the unworked-through and repressed expulsion trauma, appear in the later films that do not engage with it explicitly. During the discussion, we will link together those two traumas. We first focus on documentary films through which the public discourse that dominated many texts of Israeli culture of the period could be revealed—newspapers, political speeches, stories, poems, and so on11—and at a later stage we shift to an analysis of feature films. Ultimately, we will try to indicate how the post-traumatic language of those films disrupts the causal trajectory of events and unravels the signified-signifier connection in a way that subverts the hegemonic teleological linear narrative aspired by the Zionist project.12 Post-traumatic language leads the protagonists of the various films to eradicated repressed events in which they experienced victimhood, as well as to incidents where they caused violent wrongdoing that damaged their self-perception as victims. The traumatic structure thus calls us to reexamine Israeli society’s perceived identity as victims, the identity of the perpetrator, and what they have in common. Trauma theory is likely to help in investigating how Israeli film relates the fissured history of Israeli national redemption in a rather different, circuitous way, that requires a special language—one that can lead to an understanding of our “blindness” to the Other’s trauma and, by doing so, to an understanding of our own trauma, as both victim and wrongdoer. We intend therefore to write a different historiography of Israeli film, one that embodies in its post-traumatic language the events that have been silenced and excluded from it.

The 1940s and 1950s: The Holocaust and documentary film The framework story of Zionism that guided Israeli film during its first years, the 1940s and 1950s, is a closed story that charts a safe course from Holocaust to redemption. It is the Zionist narrative that constitutes the meta-narrative of

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Jewish society in the Land of Israel, and it is enunciated at the most overt levels of the text, those perceived as the carriers of its meaning. Yet at the same time that structure fails to supersede those pictures of the Holocaust, which time and again break into it. In documentary cinema they erupt into the endings of the films, alongside descriptions of redemption, in a montage that injects the past into the scenes of the present, in parenthetical cinematic and verbal sentences, in series of visual images that contradict the soundtrack. In all these cases, ostensibly aimed at retelling the Holocaust-and-redemption narrative, the Holocaust images and recollections impede the continuum of immigration, construction, and putting down roots, as flashes that act-out the traumatic events that has not been worked-through yet. The films themselves neither confront the trauma nor work through it; they do not even address it, but instead, “solve” it by presenting the Zionist nostrum. However, the trauma erupts again and again throughout the films, unthinkingly and inadvertently, impairing the totality of the national narrative and its pretense of representing the survivors’ narrative. The films of those years are chiefly Zionist propaganda films intended, among others, to raise funds. They are constructed along the familiar linear track from ruination to redemption, but because they were designed as propaganda—in order to raise funds by showing that money was still needed and that not all problems have been solved—they in fact disrupt that track, and construct a parallel one that does not end in redemption but returns to the ruination and has a circular ending—not in construction, but destruction. Though intended to open hearts and wallets, this structure fundamentally reflects the post-traumatic process that propels the films. The film Homecoming (produced by Joseph Krumgold and Lourie Norman, Israel, 1949)13 opens with scenes of a British detention camp in Cyprus where Jewish immigrants, caught attempting to enter Palestine illegally, are detained. The camera captures the opening of the camps’ gates and follows the immigration of the freed inmates to the newly declared State of Israel. It depicts this immigration as a rebirth, as the sole purpose, the one and only “answer” to the Holocaust, as well as its result: “This is the moment they waited for so long . . . This is the Land of Milk and Honey.” However, since the film’s aim was to raise money from American Jews, it cannot depict only the successful acclimatization and absorption of the new immigrants in the Jewish National Home and in their own homes. It therefore does quite the opposite, showing them in temporary, jerry-built transit camps, and presenting pictures of war and destruction. The film exhorts its target audience not to fail the

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new immigrants, and to ensure they do not remain in the camps: “We can fulfill or repudiate the promise of the Promised Land,” the voice-over declares, and continues with, “Were the [displaced-persons] camps in Europe evacuated only in order to build new ones here in Israel?” The camera returns to the opening scenes of the film and shows the transit camps, tents, a shelled village, and houses still lying destroyed after the 1948 war. Thus, although in the course of the film the country is shown as having been rebuilt and developed, at its end the new immigrants are not yet a part of that construction and renewal, but are still in the camps: they are associated with war and destruction. This structure, in which Holocaust and destruction are the final scenes shown, subverts the explicit message of redemption and is apparent in other films as well. The film Immigrants (Lazar Dunner, 1949) begins in Europe, with scenes of destruction and war shown in black-and-white, and continues in color to the acclimatization of Holocaust survivors in Palestine: “They have the strength to start over. It doesn’t matter what happened, they won’t be alone and will never again be persecuted. As Palestine grows, so will they.” Its aim, to show the settlement in Palestine as a response to the Holocaust, is reflected in the cut moving from war scenes to shots of children, fields and flowers, accompanied with the voice-over: “It’s good to see the family together . . . afraid of nothing. Immigration to Palestine is the fulfillment of all our dreams.” The film transforms memory of the past into hope for the future: “It’s wonderful to be able to make plans. There’s a future again.” It presents the change that the survivors have undergone, from strangers to people who belong, from fearful, helpless people to strong, tanned, muscular workers who “. . . were afraid to visit the places from which they had been expelled and discover that the war against the Jews has not yet ended. Who will help them? Who will save them? Now it’s different, we know we have nothing to fear. We belong.” As these words are spoken, the camera follows young people at agricultural work, sports, and play. The entire film is structured according to two principles that directed films produced at that time: the transformation that happens within the new immigrant who changes his identity from that of a diaspora Jew to an Israeli Jew, and the spatial expansion of the immigrant’s activities throughout the Land of Israel (in sequences depicting houses under construction, cultivated fields, thriving factories, and so on). This, however, is not enough for the film. After presenting these idyllic accounts of life in Palestine, it reverts to black-and-white and focuses on long lines of people in Europe, waiting to immigrate to Palestine: “In Europe they are waiting; every day one hears a new report about terrorism, Jews fleeing

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from the ongoing executions,” the voice-over narration explains. “Europe is filled with Jewish blood, they have no life they have no hope. Only in Palestine will they be able to find their place. This is your challenge; their fate is in your hands. You can give your share.” Although the circular plot is only a structure intended to encourage potential donors, nonetheless it discloses contents that the optimistic, linear story of redemption and rebirth has to overcome. It splits the time continuum of the film, takes the story backwards—to the evil memory that erupts from it, as acting-out by making the past events a continuing and perpetuating present, enforced by the present-tense of the ever-becoming cinematic image, thus undermines the movement from the Holocaust toward redemption, growth, and expansion. This circular structure is a deeply rooted vehicle in these propaganda films and was also used in films not specifically aimed at fund-raising. The film Israel: A Land of Miracles (Lars-Eric Kjellgren) opens with scenes of a wasteland, continues with a recapitulation of the country’s history, lingers briefly on the Holocaust, and then depicts immigration, which appears as the crowning achievement of the entire story. Its conclusion is that “there is only one inescapable solution—that it is essential to establish the State of Israel.” The film does not end, however, with this final stroke but rather with a repetition of the wasteland, as an analogy to the Holocaust, and with the promise to make it bloom again. Thus, although the film purports to deal with the transition from desert to blooming, from destruction to redemption, it actually perpetuates the memory of the destruction and the wasteland, for they are the final scenes shown, even after the land’s blossoming. In much the same way, the film The Birth of a Prophecy both begins and ends with scenes of Holocaust survivors arriving in Israel. It depicts the country as a land of serenity and peace: “From where I stand the land looks like the Garden of Eden. For us Palestine is a smile. It is ‘Shalom,’ said again and again with smiling eyes.” But the events that follow undermine this description because they bring back, again and again, scenes of the desolation that preceded the Zionist pioneering of the land. In this way the film projects a history quite different from the intended official one—a history in which the Zionist country does not provide a safe refuge for persecuted survivors: the horror of the Holocaust breaks through, in different forms of acting-out. These films thus create a tension between a structure that proceeds in time from traumatic event to solution, to a structure that halts the chronological clock and fixes the events in motionless time,14 in a past that is being acted-out in the present. One structure portrays history that leads from a state of desolation and annihilation to construction,

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flowering, and redemption in the Land of Israel; the other structure shatters that progress, returning to the events compulsively, film after film, to the Holocaust and different ways of acting-out, that reengage with it indirectly, such as the desolation that signifies it. The meanings elicited from those repetitions are the antithesis of the film’s declared ideology that arises from the continuum of destruction and redemption.

The 1960s and 1970s: Same but different The accepted perspective in Holocaust studies is that in the 1960s, with the survivors’ acclimatization in Israel, and in the wake of the Eichmann Trial and after the Six-Day War (1967) and The Yom Kipur War (1973), little by little the period of public silencing of Holocaust memories was over, and the period of working-through and mourning got underway.15 And yet, precisely during those years, and more particularly after the Six-Day War, the event of the Holocaust returned in patterns of acting-out, disrupting the causal or chronological movement of the events and continuing to serve as an element undermining the hegemonic narrative that intensified after the war, a narrative that now adhered to a linear continuum, stretching from the Holocaust to victory in the Six-Day War. The film Children of the Exodus (produced by David Ebin, Israel, 1967) finds and traces what befell four of the Exodus children who had been filmed in an immigrant train in Marseille. “What happened to them?” the narrator asks. “We were determined to find them again. But where to begin? Where to begin to look for them in a land that was reborn so miraculously?” The subject of the film is the transition from death to miraculous rebirth, from the past to the future. The film’s visuals seek to juxtapose these opposites and to find a link between each pair. These links constitute the film’s focal point and theme; the search for the four children revolves around them, and they lead to its denouement. After traversing different areas of the country and meeting an assortment of people, which enables the retelling of the rebirth-and-renewal drama, the creators of the film find the four children. They are seen, now adults, in two ways: in army uniform, as soldiers fighting in the 1967 war, and in civilian clothes, while the voice-over declares: “Lost and found! Twenty years later! Zvi Sabdor, served in 1967 in Jerusalem. Liberated in 1945 from the Budapest ghetto. Zvi Sabdor, an Israeli farmer . . . Lost, and now found! Aviva Yaniv. A survivor of Mauthausen in 1947. Today, due

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to the emergency situation of 1967 she is working again. Lives near the Jordan River, in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai . . . Lost, and now found! Zvi Kenadi. Born in Hungary; joined the partisans. Years later he is still fighting, in the Six Day War. Helping to defend the Kinneret and to rout the enemy that for years threatened the stubborn Jewish settlements below.”

Made following the 1967 War, Children of the Exodus expresses both the wave of national ardor that prevailed in the country at that time, and the growing polarity between Holocaust and heroism in the cultural mindset. It continues the prevailing pattern of Israeli cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, presenting its protagonists on the two dichotomous levels of Holocaust and heroism, in this case the Six-Day War. The terms “lost” and “found” strengthen this pattern: the protagonists have been lost, as it were, for 20 years, and the entire fullness of life of that long period is completely absent from the film. Since they are only located after the war, their whole existence is solely defined in terms of the two representative events of Holocaust and heroism. And, indeed, the film repeatedly reminds us that it was “only yesterday” that the Holocaust occurred, when “the smell of the crematoria was still fresh.” Between that yesterday and the present, little seems to have happened. The film Children of the Exodus thus expresses the familiar Holocaust and heroism story and gives the Holocaust a happy ending complete with victory and redemption. Nonetheless, the threat of the past is not silent, and repeatedly breaks into the present. The void of the full score of years between the two events depicted brings the Holocaust, that took place “only yesterday,” right into the present. This impression is strengthened even further because the Holocaust images—juxtaposed so closely with those of the present—overwhelm them. The painful memory of the Holocaust is not worked through and has no place in the continuum of time that leads from past to present—yet it bursts into the present as the acting-out of a repressed trauma. During those years, the tension between the structure that integrates memory of the Holocaust within the historical continuum, and the acting-out that embodies the terror in the present and halts that continuum, is the tension between the collective narrative and the individual narrative.16 The returning trauma undermines the collective’s narrative—representing the fact that it cannot always grant its subscribers’ security. In the film Our Country (Hamedina Shelanu), montage shots switch constantly from homes being built in Israel to the devastated homes in Europe. The declared aim of those scenes is to glorify construction as antithetical to and solving the destruction, but impressions of the

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devastation overshadow the joy of construction. Since the shots of the Holocaust overpower the entire sequence and appall the spectator, they are engraved in the memory and surpass the scenes of construction. The acting-out of the Holocaust that takes over the building process, grows more powerful when—against the backdrop of homes being built—Moshe Dayan’s speech is played: “We have widows, orphans, bereaved families. We have no orphan soldiers, we have no forgotten soldiers. There is no home in Israel without a dead (soldier), but there is no dead (soldier) without a home.” The intention to describe the transition from destruction to construction, and to present the public home as a private shelter is turned upside-down, and the private homes are classed as homes of the dead, an image that further intensifies that inversion when, after the scenes of construction, we return to destroyed rubble of grand houses in Europe. The personal past unceasingly “acts itself out” and sabotages the optimistic process proposed by the collective narrative. Moreover, the close-up shot inserts the personal past into the images of collective masses that shape the progress into the future. Individual faces are generally shot in blurred close-ups in these films, dissolving with the hordes of people filmed in long-shot,17 but when the camera does linger on those faces, they remain impressions of a private world beset by the sorrows of the past, and assails the optimist collectivist message that leads toward the future. For example, the soundtrack of Children of the Exodus presents Yaakov Waltz as a partisan and soldier, someone who helps new immigrants to settle in the Galilee, while in the close-up, he is shown in his home in Natanya, clinging to his wife and daughter, holding them as if they were a lifebelt, not his family. It is a scene that disclosed on the screen the pain of the repressed trauma, at the precise moment when it was aimed at demonstrating his heroism as a soldier, in his mission as settling the immigrants, as described in the soundtrack. A contradiction is thus created between picture and soundtrack, between the close-ups and the collective long shots of settling-in and construction—between the individual past and the national narrative.18

Later years (1980s–90s): New currents The documentary films produced in later years (part of them in the 1960s and 1970s and most of them in the 1980s and 1990s)19 seemingly transform the picture sketched in the previous films. Their focus is on the protagonists’ private world, and they are open to many differing narratives, among them the stories of

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those who, to one degree or another, have remained foreigners in Israel. But there are also stories of attempts at putting down roots and of consolation inherent in a private framework—in children, the family, in actually recalling memories and speaking about them, and also in the old national narrative that leads the survivors from Holocaust to national redemption.20 The early films tried, but failed, to mute the memory of the Holocaust; it recurred and was reexperienced in the present, like a repressed event that returns and pesters the consciousness. The later films did not silence memory, but brought it into a story which has a speaker, an interlocutor, and a coherent continuum between past and future—a vital condition, as noted, for working-through and overcoming trauma. Nevertheless, though, these films find it hard to cope with those memories. In fact, memories of the Holocaust become central in these films, and at the same time allow not only the two narratives—the private and the collective—but also a nonlinear and nonchronological juxtaposition between the three post-traumatic stages that Freud discussed: latency, acting-out, and working-through.21 This structure makes it impossible for the characters to maintain recognition of the difference between past and present that La Capra addresses.22 Ostensibly, the later documentaries engage with families already rooted in Israel, and acclimatized to it, but in fact at some point in these films it transpires that the character’s past pursues them in the present, hinders their absorption in Israel and to a great extent, leaves them foreigners in it. The documentary Choice and Destiny (1993) is filmed in the small apartment of the protagonists, the parents of the director—Tsipi Reibenbach. The protagonists’ foreignness is mirrored in the space they inhabit. In the previous films, the public space elicited stories of redemption and overcoming traumas of the past, while the private space undermined that narrative and reengaged with past horrors. In Choice and Destiny, it is the private space that has control. The whole film unfolds in a private home, and hardly any other space appears in it: but the home cannot protect the protagonists and grant them safety. Their apartment seems detached from its surroundings, sealed off, suffocating its residents; when the husband goes out, he still seems “trapped” in a space of stairways and narrow yards that close in on him, like a labyrinth. While the apartment seems oppressive and suffocating, it is actually a protective haven from the far more threatening space around them; this transpires each time that the husband leaves and the wife secures the door with three locks. She closes herself off from the outside world that contains the horrors of the past, which recur in the present.

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And so the space in the film chokes the protagonists and threatens them with the return of the silenced past. The time-structure extricates them, to some extent, from that threat, but also intensifies it. The film appears to build a time progression that works through the trauma and inserts it into a testimonial narrative continuum, which moves from the beginning of the war to its end chronologically, and makes it possible to deal with the event, assimilate it in the consciousness, and process it into a sequential story that engages with previous knowledge and is absorbed into a causal chain leading toward the future. Yet the plot’s structure freezes the protagonists in the present, or constantly takes them back to the past, to a state of trauma that has not been worked-through. The protagonists repeat cyclically and indefatigably their actions, again and again. The wife prepares a meal. She and her husband eat the meal. She cleans the kitchen and the rest of the apartment. He winds the clock. They both go to sleep. Both of them wake up, ad infinitum.23 The course of time stops in the film, also because of the association created between past and present. The father is the film’s main character. He relates to his daughter and the camera his recollections from the Holocaust, but throughout that process there is an overlap between his memories, some of which are given as voice-overs, and what is occurring in the film in the present. While he eats, the father talks about food (e.g. at a family dinner he describes how prisoners ate the dog’s food, and were shot for doing so); while he washes, he describes washing in the camps; he describes walking in snowy field as he walks to meet his friends; when he lists the work he did in the camp, the camera focuses on his wife’s housework; when his recital reaches lunchtime, his wife glances at the clock on the wall, and sees that it’s lunchtime. Throughout the film, the clock is an element equating the past with the present, and positing them as a single time, beating at the same rate, immobile, as if the Holocaust were still present and hasn’t become a distant memory.24 This equating of past and present becomes even stronger because the couple spend much of their time in silence: they sit facing each other across the kitchen table, very focused on eating the food on the plates before them, and silent. Taking the place of their voices in the present is the voice-over of the father, relating his memories. Unlike him, the mother is silent throughout the whole film, as if still submerged in Freud’s latency stage—the post-trauma silencing.25 Our impression is that the film’s protagonists are not living in the present; their lives unfold in the past, at the time of the trauma that still controls them and determines their way of life, either at the acting-out stage, or at the latency stage. In the film Because of that War (Orna Ben-Dor Niv, 1988), a documentary portraying the kinship and generational relations in two families of Holocaust

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survivors, one of the fathers, Jacko, phrases this eternal return of the past in this way: “All the time I thought that, just as that family disappeared, it could happen again.” Because of his memory of the family he lost, he ruins his son’s bar-mitzvah in the present: it is an ever-present memory, and he obsessively watches out for his children. As in Choice and Destiny, he transfers the horrors of the past to the present. Time doesn’t advance for him, but stands still. In both those films, the old national story and the family story signify the future. In Choice and Destiny, the national narrative is highly marginal and penetrates into the apartment of the Holocaust survivor couple as TV broadcasts—announcing a ceremony marking 50 years since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; mentioning Meir Feinberg who was murdered in Gaza; and discussing the prospects for renewing peace negotiations after Independence Day. All these items impact directly on the protagonists’ lives; some will determine their present-day fate, but in the film they seem remote from their lives, disconnected from them. In a televised speech from the Knesset “The president of Poland sought the Jewish people’s forgiveness for the mass extermination of Jews in his nation during the Nazi occupation.” At this point the broadcast ceases and the film moves to a scene of the two protagonists sitting and eating, and the woman asks: “Is it good? Eat, it’s a delicious cake.” The stories emanating from the radio and television appear to provide a happy ending to the story of annihilation, and compensation for the Holocaust in the form of nationhood. They evoke types of endings and compensations to which the earlier films had aspired. However they express only a tenuous echo of those endings—the film offers no more than segments from a television broadcast that ends abruptly, and doesn’t induce any reaction from the parents, who should have been more affected by them than other viewers. So the old story with its happy ending is not absent from the film Choice and Destiny, but is projected through the eyes of the protagonists who don’t participate in it: it seems irrelevant in their eyes. The phenomenon characterizes both Because of that War and, in differing degrees, all the later films. The family also signifies the future. Choice and Destiny opens with a family meal, apparently on the Sabbath eve, and ends with another family meal on Sabbath eve, that the parents have been preparing for some time, and have made gefilte fish and challah in honor of the occasion. Thus, the film gives its events an allegedly closed ending. The family transforms the cyclical time of the film into a fertile continuity—embodied in the children and grandchildren around the table. Here, even the obsessive occupation with food and cooking has a family objective, with a traditional Jewish tone. The family’s story in fact replaces the narrative of national redemption that is shunted to the margins by the personal

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redemption story. As the father Jacko remarks in the film Because of That War: “The strength I got to go on living after the Holocaust came solely from the children, the fact that I founded a new family. That was the strength that let me continue living, otherwise I would have killed myself.” But nevertheless, this redemption was incapable of covering over what unravels during the film. Friday dinner does not wipe out the desolate meals of the rest of the week, and the children who provide a source of strength are also the prime victims of their parents’ suffering; they do not provide a true replacement for what they lost there. This motif rises to the surface mainly in Because of That War. Tsipi Reibenbach’s film Choice and Destiny, like other films made at the same period, confronts the trauma of the annihilation of Europe’s Jews, by relating it, discussing it and, in so doing, paves the way to working-through it. But nonetheless, the film remains at stages of repetition and silencing. Beyond the individual reasons that can linked to the aging of the survivors, there seems to be another reason for the endurance of the Holocaust trauma. Excavating the past reveals that it is only the tip of the iceberg that conceals other traumas, that use the trauma of sacrifice in order to hide violence, shame, and guilt originating in the Israeli experience of wars, terror attacks, occupation, and the even more remote incidents of the 1948 War. These incidents in the Israeli present, their echoes and ramifications, infiltrate the world of Holocaust survivors in these films, as in every other Israeli home, and hamper coping with the core trauma of the Holocaust. In the films discussed so far, they are on the margins of the text, wavering beyond time and place. In the next section, we analyze two films: Kedma (Amos Gitai, 2002) and Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), that indicate in a more pronounced manner the ties between the two traumas. Both these films engage with wars that Israel fought—the 1948 War and the First Lebanon War— and draw them together with the memory of the Holocaust.

The 2000s: The trauma of the expulsion of Palestine’s Arabs in Kedma On the face of it, Amos Gitai’s feature film Kedma (2002) deals directly and explicitly with the process of the traumatic reception of Holocaust survivors, set against the backdrop of the savage battles of the 1948 War. In tandem with that theme, through the film’s split structure one can also identify echoes of another trauma—the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs in 1948. The film intertwines those

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traumas in a complex manner. What connects them is the question of the possibility of history—and thus the constituting of a coherent national narrative. We will show this by seeking the motif of movement found in the film’s various strata, and will demonstrate that that movement is paralyzed and violated, as a symptom of the traumatic events that it both examines and represses. Structurally, Kedma belongs to the road-movie genre and as such is fundamentally based on movement. It follows the movement of refugees from the Holocaust of European Jewry, from the ship to the shores of the Land of Israel, and from there toward Jerusalem. Along that trajectory, the refugees participate in a cinematic plot embodying the Zionist narrative. They must forget the traumatic events of the past, overcome their memories of diaspora, shed traits of their Jewish identity, join the battle with Arabs, and be transformed from passive Jews into Hebrews waging an active war for their lives and destiny. The film’s affiliation to the road-movie genre allows it to deal with movement in both time and space: from the diaspora, from the ship to Jerusalem, and from the diasporic past to the Zionist present. It is both a cinematic narrative movement and an ideological one. Yet in contrast with the original definition of a journey, as an advance from a point of departure to a destination26 and as opposed to the classic Hollywood journey based chiefly on movement-images and the causal relationship between events,27 this is a deconstructed, directionless journey, flooded by characters moving aimlessly “to” and “from.” The journey disintegrates and is disrupted because of a post-traumatic condition that has not yet been worked through, and cannot be worked through as long as the survivors are forced to move forward and relinquish their past. It is a paralyzed journey that breaks into fragments and is arrested by the flooding28 of the cinematic language at all levels, and most particularly by the clash between, on the one hand, the movement toward the future and the adoption of the cinematic and ideological narrative, and, on the other hand, the inability to do so because of the post-traumatic condition that has still not been worked-through and cannot be worked-through as long as the survivor protagonists must move ahead and abandon their past.29 The film’s opening scenes on the ship make it possible to reveal the burden of those directions and the paralysis stemming from them. Kedma is a ship with a cargo of illegal immigrants, in which the film’s protagonists begin their movement in cinematic and Zionist time and space. The ship itself is a space in movement but simultaneously traps immobility within it, because the inner space and its contents are static; only the external structure is moving. Paralysis

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is created here by two opposed forces that obstruct each other. This is expressed already in the opening of the film, by a shot crowded by people and flooded by contradictory directions of movement. It is a long-take (sequence shot)30 in which the camera follows a protagonist as he ascends from the belly of the ship to the deck, where he is swallowed in the mass of immigrants, seated, standing, or lying motionless. The contrast created between the movement of the camera depicting the space, and the significant motionlessness of the figures filling it, is what generates the impression of a formal paralysis. The shot swells until it bursts, if to paraphrase Deleuze and Guttari, from the countless motionless objects filling it, until it floods them and thus neutralizes the camera’s movement which functions as its container. That formal paralysis is also discernible in the disembarkation scene: The event depicted is one of hectic activity: hosts of refugees disembark, running in panic every which way, escaping the British soldiers who chase them. Some flee, and some are arrested. This intensive and crowded scene is filmed in wide-lens long-shot, as a long-take, accompanied by a slow and consistent tracking movement. In those shots, there is intense discordance between form and content. The distance from the objects, the width of the cinematic space, achieved by the use of long-shots, as well as the style of camera movement—seemingly neutralizing the intensiveness of the objects’ actions, moving across the screen, and thus paralyzing their movement in space. Throughout the film, in tandem with the flooding of the image and space, there is also temporal flooding. During the scene when the immigrants disembark on the beach, the camera lingers on the face of a woman survivor and captures her in close-up while she gazes in space. It seems as if she continues to weave the memories that have begun unfolding aboard the ship, but her image is superimposed onto a shot of the British attack on the refugees. In this way, the notion of the past, which is felt through the reminiscing refugee’s eyes, blends with the future—the struggle against the British—and the two tenses flood the present.31 The accelerated flooding of times is paralleled in the film by the flooding of historical times. Charles Tesson maintains that the film Kedma goes to a certain point in the past, in order to leave the historical options open.32 In fact, the intersection of times in the film casts doubt as to whether such options indeed exist. In 1948, when the battle described in the film was fought, the war’s outcome was still unknown. The flight of Palestinians from the country en masse had not yet occurred, the British Mandate was still in power, and the great triumph of the Jews lay ahead. Nevertheless, the film imparts the unknown future with a

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presence in the happenings of the past, via elements in the filmed landscape— ruins, terraces, and abandoned prickly pear bushes. In 1948, when the filmed events occurred, the Arab villages, even those already abandoned, were still intact and surrounded by prickly pear cactus hedges. In 2002, when the film was shot, what remained of the abandoned villages were ruins and a few prickly pear bushes as reminders of their existence.33 In 1948, a prickly pear bush and an Arab stone house signified the existence of a village. In 2002, the same elements signified its destruction. As the camera lingers on them, it introduces the future—the battle’s outcome and the expulsion—into a point in the past before it happened. This sort of temporal flooding is what conflates the succession of time, halts its movement, paralyzes it, transforms past, present, and future into a conflated time frame, and thus prevents the linear progress of the Zionist plot from diaspora to the Land of Israel. This creates a paralysis that perfectly expresses the post-traumatic rhetoric, which in turn generates the fixation and paralysis of the cinematic plot and the Zionist story it relates.34 Again, the question asked previously, arises: like Choice and Destiny, the film Kedma also relates the trauma of Holocaust survivors, engages with it and, even more than the previous film, broadens the story and encompasses within it the stories of the Palestinian refugees juxtaposed with those of the survivors. Thus it depicts a plethora of stories from which the full story is structured—including voices that were silenced in the past, and those silenced in the present. The story is a means of working-through the trauma, since giving the full story with all its facets is likely to ensure that it is coped with successfully. And yet the film remains at the stage of repetition and silencing. One among several explanations is the assumption that other traumas lie beneath the overt trauma that has been located and worked through. To try and lay bare some of their hidden facets, we turn to the scene of the battle of Latrun, in which the survivors who disembarked from the ship take part. The historical Latrun battle was fought on a hill, on top of which was the British police building, where the Jordanian army assembled. In the film, the battle takes place on a hill topped by a rural structure, surrounded by trees and stone fences. The historical battle was waged with Jordanian Legion soldiers, while in the film it is conducted with unidentified combatants, perhaps Palestinians, perhaps others. To identify them, the soldiers detain an Arab who has fled his village with his donkey and belongings and attempt to interrogate him and discover where the fighters went. In the real Latrun battle, however, the identity of the warriors was clear and undisputed. The villagers did not participate in

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it, and the possibility of encountering refugees with their personal belongings after it had ended was unlikely. The villages at the foot of the hill were evacuated before the battle began. Amos Gitai notes35 that he tried to combine the battle for Latrun with the battle for the Castel, so as to portray a clash between the two populations, the Palestinian and Jewish. In fact the cinematic description does not fully correspond with the Castel battle, which was a defensive battle against Arab attackers, after the Jewish fighters captured the village easily. Moreover, these details that do not fully match the battle for Latrun or for the Castel are more appropriate for a different battle—for Deir Yassin. Deir Yassin was a small village on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and maintained a friendly relationship with the Jewish Yishuv, even signing a peace and nonaggression pact with the adjacent neighborhood, Givat Shaul. In spite of the pact, on April 9, 1948, fighters from the two Jewish underground movements, the Irgun (Etzel) and the Stern Movement (Lehi) attacked the village. The operation evolved into a full-fledged battle in which more than a hundred residents, including women and children, were killed. The attackers claimed that even if the villagers had signed a peace pact and intended to uphold it, they allowed foreign fighters, Iraqis, and others, to enter the village, assume control of it, and prepare for battle. The killing during the battle shook the Jewish population of the day, was denounced by its institutions, and became a painful memory for both peoples. The film Kedma indeed deals with the Latrun and Castel battles, but most of the details that structure it relate to Deir Yassin: to the refugees who fled from it, attempts to find out who were the fighters, and where they went. Most of all, it addresses the battle and the ensuing slaughter, and the Arab’s reply “They fled when they heard what the Jews were doing.” Among the reasons given for the mass flight of the Arab villagers during the war was the rumor that spread quickly among them concerning the massacre in Deir Yassin. The battle of Deir Yassin is not described in the film, nor the massacre that took place there, but they are “present absentees” following what is signified there. In that way, the story of the sacrifice which comes to light in the recollections of the survivors and in the filming of the bloody battle they participated in, conceals another story, that of the aggressors. On the face of it, the film deals openly with the clash between two groups that are victims of injustice: Jewish refugees from Europe and Palestinian refugees, but beyond that clash, it conceals another injustice, still hidden and repressed—the story of Deir Yassin.36

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Kedma transforms the narrative of the war and the Holocaust into a story that can be told, inserts it into a situation where there is a speaker and a listener, and there is a basis for coming to terms with the trauma. But beyond the stories of the survivors who are taken to fight in Latrun, beyond the memories of the Holocaust and stories from the war, there is a story that the Israeli culture has still not fully worked-through. It is both absent and present in the film Kedma; it floods the film and immobilizes its movement. Kedma dismantles the cinematic narrative and thus signals the failure of the historical-ideological narrative according to which, and in whose shadow, Israelis live—the narrative that leads “from Holocaust to redemption.” Through that failure we can trace the post-traumatic rhetoric that immobilizes it and signals to us to stop, look back, and try to work through the events that engendered it, while at the same time to explore the trauma of the perpetrator hidden beneath the trauma of the victim. We can state therefore that Kedma hints that as long as the trauma of the perpetrator is not reexamined in depth, we cannot confront the trauma of being victims.

Traumatic traces in Khirbet Khizeh and Waltz with Bashir The film Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008),37 links more explicitly than Kedma between the trauma of the victim of wrongdoing—the victim of the Holocaust— and the trauma of the wrongdoer—this time the soldier in the Lebanon War who “sent up a flare” and guarded a refugee camp in Sabra and Shatilla while the Christian Phalangists massacred Palestinians. At the same time, those two traumas also hide the more remote core trauma that is still repressed. During the massacre, Palestinian women, old people, and children are loaded onto trucks that will take them from the refugee camps to an unknown destination. Soldiers stand around, shots are fired, a woman has difficulty climbing on to the truck, and someone helps her, and just before the shot is cut, a young boy’s face gazing, is imprinted on both films’ and viewers’ “consciousness.” Because this boy with terrified eyes and both hands raised is a cartoon child, not a real one—composed of later testimony given by those who stood-by, watching the events—we can detach him from his current context and put him in others, elsewhere. For example, the famous picture from the Warsaw Ghetto, where a child walks alongside his mother, in a line of refugees, his hands raised in surrender.38 Later in the film, the actual comparison arises explicitly in several places.39 Nevertheless, the repressed collective memory of the Israeli observer insists on seeing another

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shadow, beyond the shadows of the two children from the Warsaw Ghetto and from Sabra and Shatilla—the same frightened, angry eyes of a child, the same truck, the same line of refugees, those same soldiers standing around, the same camera-angle, located distantly and surveying the crowd moving closer to it, and the same Israeli soldier standing-by, frantic, appalled, but doing nothing. It happens in the novella by S. Yizhar Khirbet Khizeh [1949]40 that describes the expulsion of Arab villagers in 1948, and in the film by Ram Loevy (1978), that was based on the novella. Waltz with Bashir seems to reconstruct the same scene, with the same protagonists, and the same camera-angles. Khirbet Khizeh was for a long time the only film that dealt with the expulsion of Arab citizens of the country in that war. No other film touched on the subject for years.41 But nevertheless, the eyes of the child, the truck, the expulsion, and the Israeli soldier who watches wrongdoings, tries to act upon them, and fails, do recur in this cinema (e.g.: Close to Home [Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hagar, Israel, 2005]; Cup Final [Eran Riklis, Israel, 1988]; Winter Games [Ram Loevy, Israel, 1988]; Avanti Popolo [Raffi Bukai, Israel, 1986] and others).42 Ari Folman’s film has been accused of dealing with an event that is relatively easy to engage with—the murder of Moslems by Christians in Sabra and Shatilla, and his use of the animation medium further distances the narrative from reality and softens it.43 But is it possible, that in this case, like those described above, one revealed trauma provides shelter for other traumas that remain latent, deep in the unconscious, and lead back to the primary, core trauma of the 1948 War, which is experienced through forgetting. We intend to pave a path that can lead Waltz with Bashir, and with it the memory of the Holocaust and of the Lebanon War, back to the historical and dramatic event from which it has been severed. That path is a muddy one.44 The film Waltz with Bashir opens with a dream-scene in which a pack of crazed dogs racing down the Tel Aviv streets and running through a puddle of water trudging through it. The dogs are on their way to avenge the events of the Lebanon War. Around the time of the film’s first screening, a book by Amos Oz, Scenes from Village Life45 was published; the fictional village also has a puddle, and mud. The final story describes an imaginary, allegorical village that is drowning in marshes that were never dried out; the sticky mud, and “the stench of corpses” rises “from the living.”46 It is not clear if the villagers are the victims of the mud, or responsible for creating it. To understand the source and significance of the mud, the puddle, and the water, we must step back from Oz’s stories and Folman’s film, and dig deep into

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the slippery earth to try and locate other signs. In their wake, we return several years into the past to Amos Gitai’s film, Kippur (2000), which follows a helicopter rescue-crew in the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. The film opens on a wintry day, in a green and sparkling landscape, but as the war intensifies and becomes more hopeless, the battle scenes are transformed. At first we see a few puddles of water here and there, but afterwards the rescue crew sinks into the mud, unable to extricate itself or to remove casualties on stretchers. Eventually in prolonged, long shots, the whole country seems covered in mud. Mud is the setting at the end of the film, with its scenes of the dead, the injured, and those left mentally shattered.47 Is this all it implies—The pain of the soldiers who are victims of war? Or does it also imply the wrongdoings that the war caused others? We must continue excavating, walking through the muddy fields in which Amos Kenan makes Tel Aviv founder, in his apocalyptic novel Block 23,48 across the muddy paths where soldiers in the First Lebanon War are lying, in the film Ricochets (Shtei Etzbaot mi-Tzidon, Avi Cohen, Israel, 1986) fouling themselves and their comrades, and thus casting doubt on how the entire film presents them—innocent victims of a necessary war—a war that according to the then accepted discourse caused the (strong and powerful) Israeli army to founder in the “Lebanese mud.”49 Afterwards we can linger by the mud-covered military vehicle that appears at the start of One of Us (Uri Barabash, Israel, 1989) and recall the oil stain reflected on the soldiers’ faces in the film Lebanon (Shmulik Maoz, Israel, 2009). Ultimately we reach an even more distant quagmire in the period of the British Mandate, in Yitzhak Ben-Ner’s story Winter Games50 and its filmed version by Ram Loevy. Loevy’s film mostly takes place in winter, in a small outlying village. It revolves around the villagers’ bleak lives: backbreaking work, poverty, and brutality from the representatives of the British rulers. The main plot centers on a wounded fighter from the underground, who hides in a granary, receives no help and dies in front of a watching child, the protagonist of the story who has tried to tend him. He wallows together with the donkey in a mud puddle and the film presents a close-up of his legs and the animal’s legs, almost unable to move, then he takes out his pistol and shoots the donkey. Still dragging her legs, the donkey leans sideways, and sets off taking a few steps as if it’s able to walk but then collapses. The child, also sinking in the mud, watches the incident helplessly, then screams at Starkman: “Murderer, murderer!” tries to hit him but the older man throws him in the mud. Now the camera rises up and in silent shots takes

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in the landscape, the fields, the quiet mountains, and the vultures hovering over the corpse. Shots of the distant, silent landscape, that seems to be a wasteland, recur constantly throughout the film and intensify the atmosphere of death and guilt that imbue it. The film itself does not make it clear why the mercy killing of a sick beast is termed murder, and what is the origin of the guilt that pervades the village. Are the villagers simply innocent victims of foreign rule and harsh nature—or does harsh nature reflect the brutality and violence that have infiltrated and taken over the entire village?51 To understand, we must excavate backwards, and approach the final mud puddle the one depicted in Khirbet Khizeh, to that same clear winter morning in the novella by S. Yizhar, where a group of soldiers—“washed, fed and properly dressed”52—are dispatched to perform a simple mission. Like the soldiers at the start of the film Kippur, they are high-spirited, feel that the real battles are over, and what awaits them is not a battle but a “day’s hike.”53 In a scene from the book, and the film that followed it, the Arabs have to crawl through a mud puddle to reach the truck that will take them across the border. They have nothing with them, neither clothes nor blankets, no baggage, nothing to drink: they are forced to leave empty-handed. The protagonist runs to find a jerry-can of water to load on the truck, but when he returns with the water, it turns out he was too late. The truck has already driven away. The camera glances at the mud puddle of Khirbet Khizeh that is easily identified; it is the same mud puddle filmed in Winter Games, the same mud puddle that pervades Israeli literature and film, and clogs the whole country with mud. One can construe those puddles and the mud as post-traumatic signifiers, as the acting-out of the incident in the film Khirbet Khizeh. The return to events from the past is particularly prominent in the movie Winter Games: the same puddle, the same close-up of legs floundering in mud, the same gaze of the observer, impotent in the face of events, the same ubiquitous atmosphere of death. One can define the puddle in Winter Games as well as of other puddles, a signifier whose signified is hidden, delayed, stuck somewhere in the past in the cinematic story of Khirbet Khizeh. A story that is not indelibly carved into the memory, only a few blurred pictures of it remain: though its origins have been forgotten, they are passed down the generations—the acting-out of a remote trauma. There is no clear-cut, direct connection, as noted, between Waltz with Bashir and Khirbet Khizeh. But the puddle, as the repressed memory of something terrible that occurred in the past, recurs and reemerges here, as does the truck

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on which refugees, women, and old people are loaded, animals are killed, an Israeli soldier stands silently to one side, and also the watching child’s anger that “when he grows up, could only become a viper inside him.”54 Like the picture of a child being deported on a truck in Waltz with Bashir, the mud puddle itself has traveled far through the wars of Israel and has now reached the Third Millennium. A solitary signifier that has lost its signified, its meaning, and its original context, wandering through generations of forgetting, calls out to return to the terrible moment in which for the first time, those who were victims of wrongdoing became perpetrators of wrongdoing, or stood-by and did nothing. As a kind of reminder, beyond the signs of one trauma there is a sign of another trauma: beyond the child from Khirbet Khizeh and Waltz with Bashir, is that child from the Warsaw Ghetto, who, like the Israeli soldier silently watching the wrongdoing, like the trucks taking away the condemned, accompanys Israeli cinema and literature over the years, as a signifier of a distant trauma, the trauma of the victim now intertwines with the trauma of the perpetrator: S. Yizhar’s use of the word “karon” (wagon) instead of truck, the child in the film The Wooden Gun (Ilan Moshenson, Israel, 1979) who has just shot his friend and later looks at the photograph of the boy from the ghetto and identifies himself as a murderer, the Holocaust survivors who inhabit the asylum built on the rubble of Deir Yassin in the film Forgiveness (Udi Aloni, Israel, 2006)—all of them signify the two combined traumas. A closer reading of two of the films / stories—Khirbet Khizeh and Winter Games—can reveal how the traumatic chain is handed down from one generation to the next, from text to text. The scene described above from Winter Games shows the mercy-killing of an incurably sick animal, and the accusation of “murder” is inappropriate. Similarly, it is inappropriate for the present context, the accusation previously uttered by a woman from: “You’ll all be guilty.” Her cries follow the name of the “Lehi” underground being scrawled, with spelling mistakes, on the walls of village houses. Although the graffiti could incite the anger of the country’s British controllers, her accusation seems exaggerated in the context, and not appropriate for the incident. But while the accusations seem slightly overblown in the context where they appear, they are highly suitable for the context of the other film, Khirbet Khizeh—the context of the brutal expulsion of the Arabs from their village. And yet one can still wonder: there is no murder in the film Khirbet Khizeh, neither the murder of animals (two soldiers talk in a general way about shooting a donkey and a camel, but the events are not graphically related and

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are insufficiently vivid). So where does the accusation of murder fit in? Who is the murderer, which murder is cited? To elicit the answer, we must continue digging down into the past, back to that interim period of the latency stage, and engage with Yizhar’s story. In that narrative, the complete context of that scene is disclosed, as well as the missing items, and the true origin of the murder and the accusation. They are found in two discrete scenes that are absent from the filmed version of Khirbet Khizeh: In the first scene, a soldier gives a real-life, plastic description of how he fired three bullets at a donkey. The donkey’s death in Winter Games seems like a cinematic, almost word-perfect, performance of the literary description, which is absent from filmic version of Khirbet Khizeh. When it got hit in the neck, it lifted its head up and looked. Blood was already spurting out of it like a faucet. So what does this donkey do, it goes on munching grass. I got it below the ear, and it gave a start but went on standing there, looking. That was too much already. I shot it in the eye at closer range and it took a few steps farther in the grass, and then, really slowly, lazily, it dropped and sprawled over. What incredible vitality!55

The second scene, in which the soldiers shoot at the villagers, is described in both novella and film. But in the film the Arabs manage to escape. In the book, one of them is shot and his death is related in the same way that the death of the donkey is described in the text—exactly how the death of the donkey was filmed in Winter Games: Then a second round rattled out, followed at once by the third. The four people in the distance all dropped. Someone inside me choked. Time stood still for a moment and everything was unimportant. We craned our necks to see better, to get a better view. Moishe said nothing. Suddenly two of them got up and ran, and before we knew what had happened they had leapt into the bushes and vanished. Then another one got up and ran. And when the fourth one got up, the fourth round poured out, the man bent over for a moment, waited, then rose—a fifth round. He didn’t run but he walked. Then apparently he decided to crawl. Suddenly he began to roll along and was swallowed up in the grass.56

The connection between the killing of the donkey and the cry of “murderer” lies there in the remote past, in those incidents of killing people and animals. What is still unsolved is the substantive difference between killing a sick donkey, and driving out the residents of a whole village from their homes. That difference is merged there, in the distant past, by the dual use—tangible and metaphoric—of

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the term “animal.” This is how the narrator in the novella Khirbet Khizeh describes the refugees walking through the mud toward the trucks: . . . and the others walked behind them, assuming that this was the way, splashing through the water. Somebody sighed and removed his shoes to walk through the water. I don’t know why this gesture seemed so humiliating and demeaning. Like animals, I thought, like animals.57

We can say, therefore, that the traumatic incident that recurs in the text and the two films is not the killing of a donkey, but the act of expulsion and the killing and brutality accompanying it. The act is described in full in the text in the novella Khirbet Khizeh and reappears, with several lacunae and forgotten items, in the film based on it, and disappears completely in Winter Games, a film made at a later date. And yet it exists there, in another place and time, in other experiences signifying the act: the silenced picture and the unheard cries of “murder” are intertwined in recurring scenes in books and films over the years. Pictures that were detached from the causal, coherent chain to which they belong, pictures that were not processed in the consciousness, were not integrated and appear incessantly as a post-traumatic experience, detached from its context. These images return to the trauma of those raised on the narrative of Holocaust and redemption that prevailed in the public discourse and equally in the films made at the period when Khirbet Khizeh was written, and that have been discussed here. With its complex formulations, that discourse expresses the combination that underlay Zionism, of ethics and nationalism, of human redemption and national redemption, of belief that Judaism’s goal is to supply a foundation for a universal morality58 and the belief that national redemption can achieve those universal goals. The suffering that the Jews went through would serve as basis and justification for that kind of moral perspective. That mixture of nationalism and morality was severed when the disparity was discovered between the narrative through which the Jewish people understood itself and organized its past as a victim, and as a theme of universal justice, and the real story of the war—a (hi)story of violence—of expulsion and occupation. The trauma created in this case originates in a split between the two identities— the ethical and the national, the identity of the Jew as the victim of the Holocaust, and his identity as the Israeli warrior. The story of Khirbet Khizeh revealed that split. During the debates set off over the book and the film, S. Yizhar pointed out that “Until then, we knew some things were simply not done, certainly not by Jews,” “. . . when I wrote Khirbet Khizeh, I didn’t write it as a Jew versus an Arab,

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I wrote it as a human being who had been damaged.” The story’s protagonist observes his comrades and experiences the moment when they stopped looking at the Other’s face, as Emmanuel Lévinas phrases it. That, he realizes, was the moment when they lost their own humanity, and their identities split.59 That moment, was for Israeli literature and cinema—as well as for an extensive part of Israeli culture—a traumatic moment. It is the remorse-ridden character of the Israeli soldier in Waltz with Bashir who can in fact take us there, and shed light on the differences between the novella Khirbet Khizeh, that specifically sounded the alarm against a known wrongdoing, and the films made later that recreate— through post-traumatic structures—a forgotten and repressed incident that cannot be represented in any other manner. At the period when the story was written and when the first documentaries were being made, events could be processed and organized within a coherent Zionist narrative that tied together national identity and universal humanism. Belief in building a new society, an enlightened state that fulfilled universal justice, made it possible to create a causal chain in which the events of the expulsion were considered mistakes, exceptions that would be repaired once the goal was achieved.60 In such a chain, the traumatic events of the Holocaust and those of Israeli wrongdoings, alike, could be integrated, and a narrative found with a closed ending, terminating in redemption.61 Though that narrative did not encompass the events of the Holocaust that, as described above, broke into the subtext of the films, it did organize the actual fact of the expulsion of the Arabs in pre-statehood Israel, and enabled coping with it as part of the necessary process that would lead toward redemption. When that narrative disintegrates, and with it the integration of ethical and national identity, no option remains to organize both traumas, work through them and so find healing. That is why the story of the expulsion that had previously been worked through, was once again repressed into the stages of forgetting and latency. It thus constitutes a covert trauma, hidden beneath the overt trauma of the Holocaust, which is expressed through it. The two traumas feed off each other, rendering impossible healing and working-through.

Conclusion We can state, then, that the trauma of the expulsion also carries the traumas of the war and the Holocaust, thus inverting a chronological structure of the chain of traumas Perhaps, as he argued that the unconscious has no causal, organized

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temporality, so too the trauma—the event that is “stored” in the labyrinth of the unconscious—does not respond to that or any other linear order. It seems that until the later trauma of the expulsion is worked through and narrated in full, as a dialogue between speakers and interlocutors, it will also be impossible to genuinely come to terms with the trauma of the Holocaust. And thus those traumas, holding each other within them, will continue bursting into films and literature, and into Israel’s social consciousness, preventing the possibility of reshaping a Zionist narrative which progresses from past to future, thus from idea to its realization.

Notes The article is based on research funded by the Israeli National Foundation for Science. 1 See: Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 12 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74), 147–56; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (London: Johns Hopkins University, 1996); Dominick LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate,” History and Memory 9 (1997): 80–113; Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). Mihal Friedman drew our attention to the range of articles on the matter of trauma. 2 This idea is following Caruth’s conceptualization of the structure of trauma, drawing on Freud’s. See: Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. 3 See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience; Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate”; Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony (New York: Routledge, 1992); Christine Van Boheemen-Saaf, Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and The Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Post-Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 4 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. 5 Thomas Elsaesser and Boaz Hagin, Memory, Trauma and Fantasy in American Cinema [in Hebrew] (Ra’anana: The Open University of Israel, 2012); see also Thomas Elsaesser, Melodrama and Trauma: Modes of Cultural Memory in the American Cinema (Oxford: Routledge, 2008). 6 Elsaesser and Hagin, Memory, Trauma and Fantasy in American Cinema.

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7 See Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through”; Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. For a fundamental study of Israeli film’s role in shaping memory, trauma, and loss, see Régine-Mihal Friedman, “Between Silence and Abjection: The Cinematic Medium and the Israeli War Widow,” in Fictive Looks on Israeli Cinema, ed. Nurith Gretz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: The Open University, 1998), 33–43; Raya Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema (London: I.B. Tauris, in press); Yosefa Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen (Austin: Texas University Press, 2001); Raz Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Oxford: Routledge, 2011); Yael Munk, “Kippur ou l’anatomie d’un traumatisme,” in CinemAction, ed. Lucie Degas (Paris: Corlet Publications, 2009), 110–15; Munk, “Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story: When a Film Turns into a Graphic Novel,” in Temoigner: Entre Histoire et Temoignage (Paris: Editions Kimé, 2011), 209–20; Munk, “Blood, People, Earth: On ‘Forgiveness’ (Udi Aloni, 2006),” in Cinema South Notebooks, 2 [in Hebrew], ed. Yael Munk and Eyal Sivan (Pardess, 2007), 59–65; Munk, “From National Heroes to Post-National Witnesses: A Reconstruction of the Israeli Soldiers’ Cinematic Narrative as Witnesses of History,” in War and Narrative in Israeli Society and Culture, ed. Ranen Omer Sherman and Rachel S. Harris (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012); Judd Ne’eman, “The Tragic Sense of Zionism: Shadow Cinema and the Holocaust,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 22–36. 8 Sigmund Freud, “The Unconscious,” in Standard Edition, vol. 14, 187. 9 Anat Zanger discusses the Zionist trauma of encountering an inhabited land in: “The Desert or the Myth of the Empty Space,” in Place, Memory and Mythin Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Valentine Mitchell, 2012). On granting a voice to victims in Israeli film, see Anat Zanger, “Between the Sea and the Mikveh: The Voice of the Siren in Israeli Contemporary Cinema,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel: studies in Israeli and modern Jewish society, Beer Shava: Ben-Gurion University, 2011, http://in.bgu.ac.il/bgi/iyunim/DocLib1/%D7%9E%D7%92%D7%93%D7%A8%20 %D7%91%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%9C,%20 %D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%AA%20%D7%96%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%A8.pdf. (Ben-Gurion University, 2011); Yael Munk, Israeli Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium [in Hebrew] (Ra’anana: The Open University, 2012). 10 For a discussion of the ties between the trauma of the Holocaust and the war, and the divide between history and Israel’s cultural memory, see Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema. 11 See also Nurith Gertz, Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000).

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12 See Homi Bhabha’s discussion on the linear, teleological, and causal movement of narrative as an ideological tool of the hegemony: Homi K. Bhabha, “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 291–323. 13 For a discussion of these films, see: Nurith Gertz, Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved [Ofakim], The Open University, 2004). Although most of these films were scripted in English and addressed to American audiences, some were created by people who had come to the country for the purpose of settling (examples are Joseph Leits, Meyer Levin, George Lloyd George, and Hemlar Larsky). Israeli artists and actors participated in some of them, and local institutions such as the Jewish National Fund and Keren Hayesod funded all of them. Most of these films can be found in The Spielberg Archive, The Ghetto Fighters’ House Archives, Israel State archives, and The Anda Zimand Film Archive at the Department of Film & Television, Tel Aviv University. In many cases details for these films are missing (director’s name, producer’s name, year of production, etc.). In cases in which these details were available they are mentioned in the article. 14 Laurence L. Langer, “Remembering Survival,” in Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 70–81. Langer describes the tension between those structures as that between story and plot. Auschwitz as a plot, Langer contends, stops the chronological clock and positions events within the imagination and memory. As a story, Auschwitz allows us to move through and beyond the events. 15 Regarding the divide between the Zionist memory and the individual memory, on the question of Auschwitz, see: Anita Shapira, Old Jews, New Jews [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1997); Gertz, Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others; Avner Holtzman, “The Theme of the Holocaust in Hebrew Prose: The New Wave,” Dapim: Research in Literature [in Hebrew] 10 (1996): 131–58. 16 On the tension between collective traumas and the traumas of other groups in Israeli society, see Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma. 17 See the discussion on the individual and the collective faces in Israeli cinema, in Yigal Burstein, The Face as Battlefield: The Cinema History of the Israeli Face [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1990). 18 And see in Bhabha (“DissemiNation”) the discussion of the unmeasured action of life that shatters the symbolic structure of the nation. 19 Among them: Daddy Come to the Fair (Nitza Gonen [1995]); Hugo (Yair Lev [1990]); The Last Sea (Haim Gouri, Jacques Ehrlich, and David Bergman [1979]). 20 See also: Shapira, New Jews, 101; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1992); Moshe Zuckerman, Holocaust in the Sealed Room [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: self-published by the author, 1993).

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21 Freud (“Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through”; “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition, vol. 14, 243–58), distinguishes between working-through and acting-out, and accordingly between mourning and melancholia. While the mourner recognizes the total absence of the lost object as belonging to the past via working-through, the melancholic insists on seeing it as if it still exists in the present, through various phenomena that “demonstrate” its presence. In this way Freud addresses acting out as a post-traumatic symptom, an action that signifies a repressed event from the past, which is experienced in the present. 22 Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through”; LaCapra, “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate.” 23 See a description of that routine and of this film as a whole in: Régine-Mihal Friedman, “Witnessing for the Witness: Choice and Destiny by Tsipi Reibenbach,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 81–93. 24 Here the survivors experience the trauma, as Laub contends (Felman and Laub, Testimony), not via memories of the past, but as an event that has not ended and therefore continues into the present. 25 For a discussion of this question in the film Choice and Destiny, see: Yael Munk, “Ethics and Responsibility: The Feminization of the New Israeli Documentary,” Israel Studies 16, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 151–64. 26 On the road-movie genre dealing with movement, and bearing the inherent promise of redemption— particularly in American culture—see David Lederman, Driving Visions: Exploring The Road Movie (Austin: Texas University Press, 2002); Corey K. Creekmur, “On The Run and On The Road: Fame and The Outlaw Couple in American Cinema,” in The Road Movie Book, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (New York, 2002), 90–109. 27 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 28 By “flooding” we follow Deleuze and Guattari’s observations on “minor literature.” In their reading of Kafka, they notice this praxis, whose role is to interrupt language from conducting its referential, indicating role. It is a subversive act aimed against the hegemonic language, or, as they call it, “major language.” The effect can be reached in two ways: the first, is to “dry” the language up by using intentionally scanty, restrained language to reach a material intensive expression against any symbolic, meaningful or simply signifying use. The second, is to artificially enrich the language, to swell it with all the means of symbolism, to overact in an extroversive manner, in other words to “flood” it. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

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29 For a wide-ranging discussion of the cinematic representation of the Zionist narrative as a hegemonic narrative, see Gertz, Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others; Loshitzky, Identity Politics on the Israeli; Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/ West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: Texas University Press, 1989); Nitzan Ben-Shaul, Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997); Raz Yosef, Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Ilan Avisar, “Israeli Cinema and the Ending of Zionism,” in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism in Israel in the Nineties, ed. Fred Lazin and Greg Mahler (Florida, 1996), 153–68. On the films of Amos Gitai, see Irma Klein, Amos Gitai: Cinema, Politics, Aesthetics [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press, 2003); Paul Willemen, “Bangkok-Bahrain-Berlin-Jerusalem,” in The Films of Amos Gitai: A Montage, ed. Willemen (London: BFI, 1993), 5–16. 30 For a contemporary discussion of the long-shot, see Aharon Keshales and Eran Sagi, “Uber das PCS oder: Die Angst vor dem Schnitt,” in Philosophie des Films, ed. Engell Lorenz and Leitner Birgit (Weimar: Verl. d. Bauhaus-University, 2007), 270–93. 31 This survivor’s gaze can also be read as manifesting the Deleuzian crisis in the sensory-motor regime (Deleuze, Cinema 1; Cinema 2). 32 Charles Tesson, “Le Chemin de Jerusalem,” Cahiers de Cinema (2002): 30–1. 33 On ruins as allegory, see Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1988). For a discussion on landscape in Israeli cinema, see Anat Zanger, “Blind Spaces: Roadblock Movies in Contemporary Israeli Film,” Shofar, Special Issue on Israeli Cinema, 24 (2005): 4–37; Zanger, “Zionism and the Detective: Imaginary Territories in Israeli Popular Cinema,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 3, no. 3 (2004): 307–18. 34 See also Thomas Elsaesser, “One Train May Be Hiding Another: Private History, Memory and National Identity,” in The Low Countries: Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands—A Yearbook, 1996–1997, ed. Josef Delau et al. (Belgium: Rekkem). To describe the trauma, Elsaesser uses the concept of parapraxis, that Freud coined in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901, trans. Anthea Bell [New York: Penguin Books, 2003]) in order to define the condition in which the absent (the forgotten, distanced, or concealed) emerges in the present, not wholly present—but in the wrong place and at the wrong time. 35 In a personal interview, 2008. 36 On the expulsion, the refugees, the battle for Latrun and the “battle” of Khirbet Khizeh, see Anita Shapira, “Historiography and Memory: The Case of Latrun 1948,” in Old Jews New Jews, 46–85; Shapira, “Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting,” Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 1–62; Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

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37 In this essay we do not fully relate to the ties between the trauma of the Lebanon War in Waltz with Bashir and ethical positions. That subject is addressed in Yosef, The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema; and in Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni, “The Muddy Path between Lebanon and Khirbet Khizeh: Trauma, Ethics, and Redemption in Israeli Film and Literature,” in Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic, ed. Boaz Hagin, Sandra Meiri, Raz Yosef, and Anat Zanger (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 35–58.On the ethics of trauma in Israeli cinema, see: Régine-Mihal Friedman, “Double meurtre sur la 443: tuer et pleurer,” in Mélanges pour, ed. Marc Ferro, Sylvie Dallet et Michel Cade (forthcoming); Shmulik Duvdevani, First Person, Camera [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2010); Anat Zanger, “Blind Spaces”; Zanger, “Between Beaufort and My Father, My Lord, The Binding Myth and the Voice of the Mother in Contemporary Israeli Cinema,” in Identities in Motion: Contemporary Israeli Cinema, ed. Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg (Austin: Texas University Press, 2010), 225–38; Yael Munk, “The Privatization of War Memories in Recent Israeli War Films,” in Identities in Motion: Contemporary Israeli Cinema, ed. Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg (Austin: Texas University Press, 2010), 96–109; Judd Ne’eman, “Camera Obscura of the Fallen: Military Pedagogy and its Accessories in Israeli Cinema,” in Security and Communication: The Dynamics of the Interrelationship, ed. Lebel Udi [in Hebrew] (Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2005); Ne’eman, “Lo Sam Zain—Don’t Give a Damn,” in The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East, ed. Gönül Domnez-colin (London and New York: 24 Frames Wallflower Press, 2007); Judd Neeman and Yael Munk, “‘Avanti Popolo’ or the Battle Cry of the Fallen,” in Film and Politics in the Middle East and the Maghreb, ed. Josef Gugler (Austin: Texas University Press, 2011); Raya Morag, “Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema,” Camera Obscura (in press); Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema; Sandra Meiri, “History, Trauma and Ethics in Judd Ne’eman’s Cinematic Oeuvre,” Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel, History, Society, Culture [in Hebrew] 14 (2008): 35–69; Meiri, “Trauma and Ethics in Udi Aloni’s Forgiveness,” in Identities in Transition in Israeli Culture [in Hebrew] (Ra’anana: The Open University of Israel Press, 2012). 38 See also the discussion on the place of the Holocaust in Lebanon films: Ilan Avisar “Solo Dance in the Lebanese Quagmire,” Azure—Ideas for the Jewish Nation 36 (2009), www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=495. 39 When Folman’s friend, Uri Sivan, tells him that his trauma from the refugee camps is in fact a cover-trauma to that of Auschwitz, with which Folman was raised as a child; and when Ron Ben-Ishai says to Folman that the sights in the refugee camp, of civilians being loaded onto trucks, remind him of the “photo from the Warsaw Ghetto.”

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40 S. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, trans. Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck (Jerusalem: Ibis, 2008). 41 A recent film that touched on the subject is Udi Aloni’s Forgiveness (2006). 42 See analyses of these and other films by Ben-Shaul, Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films; Anat Zanger, “Blind Spaces.” 43 See: Pablo Utin, The New Israeli Cinema—Conversations with Filmmakers [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008); Raz Yosef, “Visual Evidences: History and Memory in Israeli Cinema,” Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel— History, Society, Culture 14 (2008): 1–12. 44 For an analysis of the path that connects time and space and reveals old traumas, see: Anat Zanger, “Periphery and Nostalgia in the Space of Contemporary Israeli Cinema,” BGU Review (Beer Sheva: Heksherim Institute, Ben Gurion University, Summer 2008). 45 Amos Oz, Scenes from Village Life, trans. Nicholas de Lange (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011). 46 Ibid., 210. 47 See also a discussion of the film Kippur in Raz Yosef, “Spectacles of Pain: War, Masculinity and the Masochistic Fantasy in Amos Gitai’s Kippur,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 49–66. The metaphoric status of mud is notable in view of the fact that in the Yom Kippur War no rain fell and there was no mud. 48 Amos Keinan, Block 23: Letters from Ness Ziona [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1996). 49 As noted, the concept “Lebanese mud” was identified among the Israeli public with the First Lebanon War. For an extensive discussion on that discourse, see Udi Lebel, “Militarism versus Security: the Double-Bind of Israel’s Dual Emphasis on Military Bereavement and Hierarchy of Loss,” in Military-Culture-Media Representation in Israel, ed. R. Harris (Indiana University Press, 2009); Nurith Gertz, “The Medium that Mistook itself for War: Cherry Season in Comparison with Ricochets and Cup Final,” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 153–75. 50 Yitzhak Ben-Ner, “Winter Games,” in Rural Sunset: Stories [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved 1996). 51 It is worth noting in this context that the films Waltz with Bashir and Lebanon also contain scenes of animals killed during the fierce battles. In Waltz with Bashir they are dogs and horses and in Lebanon—a donkey and chickens. In these two cases and perhaps another still, we can connect the sights of horror that evoke compassion for the animals with the sense of guilt that accompanies the Israeli soldier as responsible for the deaths of innocents. Waltz with Bashir goes further and positions the murder of dogs as the reason for the protagonist’s recollection of

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52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61

Deeper than Oblivion the massacre in Sabra and Shatilla. All these scenes take us back to the slaughtered animals, guilt, and bloodshed in Khirbet Khizeh, during the 1948 War. Yizhar, Khirbet Khizeh, 34. Ibid. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 20 (English translation). Ibid., 37–8 (English translation). Ibid., 98 (English translation). Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice,” Journal of Religion 67, no. 1 (1987): 1–13. The face is how the other “turns” to me (Lévinas indeed uses this etymology of the concept) and asks me to know him as such, not as an object. The face is a sort of “gate” leading into what cannot be objectified through the gaze, to the subjectivity situated behind it, in a manner that does not totally lend itself to discipline and interpretation. It is an ethical request to acknowledge total otherness, the other as an other (Hagai Knaan, Panimdibur: Seeing the Other Following Emmanuel Lévinas [in Hebrew] [Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Hameuchad, Kav Adom series, 2008); (Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001]). See also: Anita Shapira, “Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting.” Saul Friedlander, When Memory Comes (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979); Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

Bibliography Avisar, Ilan. “Dancing Solo in the Lebanese Mud.” Azure Online, no. 36 (Spring 2009), www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=495. —. “Israeli Cinema and the Ending of Zionism.” In Twentieth Century Literary Criticism in Israel in the Nineties, 153–68. Edited by Fred Lazin and Greg Mahler, 153–68. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1996. Benjamin, Walter. The Origins of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: Verso, 1988. Ben-Ner, Yitzhak. “Winter Games.” In Rustic Sunset. 1976. Translated by Robert Whitehill-Bashan. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1998. Ben-Shaul, Nitzan. Mythical Expressions of Siege in Israeli Films. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Bhabha, Homi K. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

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Burstein, Yigal. The Face as Battlefield: The Cinema History of the Israeli Face [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 1990. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. London: Johns Hopkins University, 1996. Creekmur, Corey K. “On the Run and On the Road: Fame and the Outlaw Couple in American Cinema.” In The Road Movie Book, edited by Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark, 90–109. New York: Routledge, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. 1983. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. —. Cinema 2: The Time Image. 1985. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1975. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Duvdevani, Shmulik. First Person Camera [in Hebrew]. Jeruslaem: Keter Books, 2010. Elsaesser, Thomas. Melodrama and Trauma: Modes of Cultural Memory in the American Cinema. Oxford: Routledge, 2008. —. “One Train May Be Hiding Another: Private History, Memory and National Identity.” In The Low Countries: Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands—A Yearbook, 1996–1997. Edited by Josef Delau et al. Belgium, Rekkem: Flemish-Netherlands Foundation, 1997. Elsaesser, Thomas and Boaz Hagin. Memory, Trauma and Fantasy in American Cinema [in Hebrew]. Ra’anana: The Open University of Israel, 2012. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony. New York: Routledge, 1992. Freud, Sigmund . “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 14, 243–58. —. Psychopathology of Everyday Life. 1901. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. —. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, vol. 12, 2001, 147–56. —. “The Unconscious.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey, vol. 14, 159–215. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74. Friedlander, Saul. Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. —. When Memory Comes. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979. Friedman, Régine-Mihal. “Between Silence and Abjection: The Cinematic Medium and the Israeli War Widow,” in Fictive Looks on Israeli Cinema [in Hebrew]. Edited by Nurith Gertz, Orly Lubin, and Judd Ne’eman, 33–43. Tel Aviv: The Open University, 1998. —. “Double meurtre sur la 443: tuer et pleurer.” In Melanges pour Marc Ferro. Edited by Sylvie Dallet and Michel Cade. Forthcoming.

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—. “Witnessing for the Witness: ‘Choice and Destiny’ by Tsipi Reibenbach.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 81–93. Gertz, Nurith. Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved and The Open University, 2004. —. “The Medium that Mistook Itself for War: Cherry Season in Comparison with Ricochets and Cup Final.” Israel Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 153001E175. —. Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000. Gertz, Nurith and Gal Hermoni. “The Muddy Path between Lebanon and Khirbet Khizeh Trauma, Ethics, and Redemption in Israeli Film and Literature.” In Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic. Edited by Boaz Hagin, Sandra Meiri, Raz Yosef, and Anat Zanger, 35–58. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Holtzman, Avner. “Contemporary Trends in Israeli Fiction of the Holocaust.” Dapim: Research in Literature [in Hebrew] 10 (1996): 131–58. Jonas, Hans. “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice.” Journal of Religion 67, no.1 (1987): 1–13. Kaes, Anton. From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. —. Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Kenan, Amos. Block 23: Letters from Ness Ziona [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Zmora Bitan, 1996. Keshales, Aharon and Sagi Eran. “Uber das PCS oder: Die Angst vor dem Schnitt.” In Philosophie des Films. Edited by Engell Lorenz and Leitner Birgit, 270–93. Weimar: Verl. d. Bauhaus-University, 2007. Klein, Irma. Amos Gitai: Cinema, Politics, Aesthetics [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad Press, 2003. LaCapra, Dominick. “Revisiting the Historians’ Debate.” History and Memory 9 (1997): 80–113. —. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Langer, Laurence L. “Remembering Survival.” In Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. Edited by Geoffrey H. Hartman, 70–81. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1994. Lebel, Udi. “Militarism versus Security: The Double-Bind of Israel’s Dual Emphasis on Military Bereavement and Hierarchy of Loss.” In Military-Culture-Media Representation in Israel. Edited by R. Harris. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Lederman, David. Driving Visions: Exploring the Road Movie. Austin: Texas University Press, 2002. Lévinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001. Loshitzky, Yosefa. Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen. Austin: Texas University Press, 2001.

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Meiri, Sandra. “History, Trauma and Ethics in Judd Ne’eman’s Cinematic Oeuvre.” Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel, History, Society, Culture [in Hebrew] 14 (2008): 35–69. —. “Trauma and Ethics in Udi Aloni’s Forgiveness.” In Identities in Transition in Israeli Culture [in Hebrew]. Ra’anana: The Open University of Israel Press, forthcoming, 2012. Morag, Raya. “Perpetrator Trauma and Current Israeli Documentary Cinema.” Camera Obscura, in press. —. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, in press. Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Munk, Yael. “Blood, People, Earth: On ‘Forgiveness’ (Udi Aloni, 2006).” Cinema South Notebooks [in Hebrew] 2 (2007): 59–66. —. “The City of Acre’s Space as the Space of the Sick Body: On Judd Ne’eman’s Film ‘Observation on Acre, January 1976.’” Cinema South Notebooks [in Hebrew] 1 (2006): 85–90. —. “Ethics and Responsibility: The Feminization of the New Israeli Documentary.” Israel Studies 16, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 151–64. —. “From National Heroes to Post-National Witnesses: A Reconstruction of the Israeli Soldiers’ Cinematic Narrative as Witnesses of History.” In War and Narrative in Israeli Society and Culture. Edited by Ranen Omer Sherman and Rachel S. Harris. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012. —. Israeli Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium [in Hebrew]. Ra’anana: The Open University, 2012. —. “Kippur ou l’anatomie d’un traumatisme.” In CinemAction. Edited by Lucie Degas, 110–15. Paris: Corlet Publications, 2009. —. “The Privatization of War Memories in Recent Israeli War Films.” In Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. Edited by Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg, 96–109. Austin: Texas University Press, 2011. —. “Waltz with Bashir: A Lebanon War Story: When a Film Turns into a Graphic Novel.” In Temoigner: Entre Histoire et Temoignage, 209–20. Paris: Editions Kimé, 2011. Ne’eman, Judd. “Camera Obscura of the Fallen: Military Pedagogy and its Accessories in Israeli Cinema.” In Security and Communication: The Dynamic of the Inter-relationship [in Hebrew]. Edited by Udi Lebel. Beersheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2005. —. “Lo Sam Zain—Don’t Give a Damn.” In The Cinema of North Africa and the Middle East. Edited by Gönül Dönmez-Colin. London and New York: 24 Frames Wallflower Press, 2007. —. “The Tragic Sense of Zionism: Shadow Cinema and the Holocaust.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Special Issue: Israeli Cinema, 24, no. 1 (2005): 22–36.

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Neeman, Judd and Munk Yael. “‘Avanti Popolo’ or the Battle Cry of the Fallen.” In Film and Politics in the Middle East and the Maghreb. Edited by Josef Gugler. Austin: Texas University Press, 2011. Oz, Amos. Scenes from Village Life. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. London: Chatto & Windus, 2011. Segev, Tom. The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. Translated by Haim Watzman. New York: Henry Holt, 1991. Shapira, Anita. “Hirbet Hizah: Between Remembrance and Forgetting.” In Jewish Social Studies 7, no. 1 (Fall 2000): 1–62. Shapira, Anita. New Jews, Old Jews [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1998. Shohat, Ella. Israeli Cinema: East / West and the Politics of Representation. Austin: Texas University Press, 1989. Tesson, Charles. “Le Chemin de Jerusalem.” Cahiers de Cinema (2002): 30–1. Utin, Pablo. The New Israeli Cinema—Conversations with Filmmakers [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2008. Van Boheemen-Saaf, Christine. Joyce, Derrida, Lacan and the Trauma of History: Reading, Narrative, and Post-Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Willemen, Paul. “Bangkok-Bahrain-Berlin-Jerusalem.” In The Films Of Amos Gitai: A Montage. Edited by Willemen, 5–16. London: British Film Institute, 1993. Yizhar, S. Khirbet Khizeh. Translated by Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck. Jerusalem: Ibis, 2008. Yosef, Raz. Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2004. —. The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema. Oxford: Routledge, 2011. —. “Spectacles of Pain: War, Masculinity and the Masochistic Fantasy in Amos Gitai’s ‘Kippur.’” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Special Issue: Israeli Cinema 24, no. 1 (2005): 49–66. —. “Visual Evidences: History and Memory in Israeli Cinema.” Israel: Studies in Zionism and the State of Israel—History, Society, Culture [in Hebrew] 14 (2008): 1–12. Zanger, Anat. “Between Beaufort and My Father, My Lord: The Binding Myth and the Voice of the Mother in Contemporary Israeli Cinema.” In Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion. Edited by Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg, 225–38. Austin: Texas University Press, 2011. —. “Between the Sea and the Mikveh: The Voice of the Siren in Israeli Contemporary Cinema.” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel: studies in Israeli and modern Jewish society, Beer Shava: Ben-Gurion University, 2011, http://in.bgu.ac.il/bgi/iyunim/ DocLib1/%D7%9E%D7%92%D7%93%D7%A8%20%D7%91%D7%99%D 7%A9%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%9C,%20%D7%A2%D7%A0%D7%AA%20 %D7%96%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%A8.pdf.

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—. “Blind Spaces: Roadblock Movies in Contemporary Israeli Film.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Special Issue: Israeli Cinema 24, no. 1 (2005): 4–37. —. “The Desert or the Myth of the Empty Space.” In Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema, 99–117. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2012. —. “Rural Sunset: Periphery and Nostalgia in the Landscapes of Contemporary Israeli Cinema.” Translated by Rebecca Gillis. BGU Review. Beer Sheva: Heksherim Institute (Summer 2008). http://cmsprod.bgu.ac.il/Eng/Centers/review/summer2008/Rural_ Sunset.htm —. “Zionism and the Detective: Imaginary Territories in Israeli Popular Cinema of the 1960s.” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 3, no. 3 (2004): 307–17. Zuckerman, Moshe. The Holocaust in the Sealed Room [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: author-published, 1993.

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11

Last Train to the Holocaust Judd Ne’eman and Nerit Grossman

To be a Jew, that meant for me, from this moment on, to be a dead man on leave, someone to be murdered, who only by chance was not yet where he properly belonged; and so it has remained, in many variations, in various degrees of intensity, until today . . . Jean Améry1 Two films about the Holocaust that reached the screens in recent years, Life is Beautiful (Roberto Benigni, 1997), followed by Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), demonstrate cinematically Karl Marx’ saying that “[. . .] all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. [. . . ] the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”2 A discussion of the two films provides an introduction to Israeli films about the Holocaust that were produced over the past decade, and are analyzed here. Both films belong to what might be called “non-historical films”: the plots are based on events from the past, but each one presents a grotesque form of those events, thus evoking meanings that were never cited in history books. Life is Beautiful shows a Nazi concentration camp as a kind of “summer camp for adults, plus a kid” while preserving the never-eased tension between horror at the Nazi terror-machine and the sense of fun that children’s literature provides. The cognitive dissonance that the audience senses watching the movie requires them to take account of the characters’ existential situation, and their presence in two disparate modes of existence that are nevertheless simultaneously embodied in the film. In spectators’ consciousness, this deception generates a sense of disbelief as to the film’s representation of reality, in particular concerning the Nazi regime in Germany and the Holocaust they wrought across Europe, that targeted Jews and also other peoples. In this case, “sense,” understood

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following Gottlob Frege’s use of the term, is that consciousness midway between our verbal comprehension of the word “Nazism” and what actually happened in the parts of the world they controlled. It is the sense of illusion experienced as reality and, to the same extent, reality as an illusion. In Life is Beautiful, Benigni succeeds in capturing this elusive “sense” of the Nazi terror apparatus. The film generates a particularly troubling kind of awareness: a sense of illusion experienced as reality and, at the same time, a sense that reality is an absolute illusion. Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds that also presents a type of farce, however, uses a different strategy. While in reality the Nazis perpetrated horrors and the Jews were the victims, in Tarantino’s film the Jews appear as a squad of avenging devils who kill and scalp their Nazi victims. In a specific reading of the cinematic iconography, that reversal specifically occurs when Corporal Hitler, suffering from PTSD sustained in WWI trenches,3 takes orgiastic delight in watching a Nazi feature film about that war. In occupied Paris, Hitler and a group of henchmen watch a WWI German soldier who has holed up at the top of a tower and repels and mows down hundreds of enemy soldiers with a sniper’s rifle. Hitler watches the film with tremendous pleasure, roaring with laughter derived from the relief of returning to the scene of his trauma in the trenches of World War I, but this time without being exposed to the tangible horror. Soon, however, the tables are turned. Hitler and his entourage, the Nazi high-command, are all exterminated either by the firestorm perpetrated by the Jewish woman owner of the theater, or by machine-gun fire from the avenging Jews—the inglorious bastards. The information that the film provides is meant to inscribe belief in its tangibility, and to encourage viewers to abandon the natural tendency to judge the film realistically. An alternative past—“improved” by comparison with what actually happened—is of course a cinematic invention that the contemporary audience is aware of, but nevertheless accepts. Their acceptance of an alternative past posited by the film occurs in the presence of the figure of Hitler who is impelled to return obsessively to the setting of his wartime trauma in World War I.4 The film generates a kind of electric short-circuit in Hitler’s obsessive behavior. The fire, explosions, and machine-gun volleys in the Paris movie theater constitute a suicidal slaughter that fulfills Hitler’s desire to stage reality. From this specific perspective, Adolf Hitler who had “staged” World War II, in the film falls victim to a Jewish/ American alternative staging of the war.5 In the staged reality of Inglorious Basterds we do accept that the war ended prematurely—Hitler and the Nazi leaders are killed in

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a funeral pyre immediately after the German army occupies Paris. Sadly, that was not the case in reality. In the 2000s, several films engaging the Holocaust appear on Israeli screens. Most are journey films, depicting an actual return to, or recollection of, historical events. The films portray anguished journeys where the sense of shame is intertwined with an aspiration for an unachievable outcome: healing the trauma of the Holocaust. Like the cognitive dissonance in the two non-Israeli Holocaust films, the characters in the Israeli films confront an illusionary memory through a lens that distorts both memory and the records of historical events. This kind of cinematic look at the Holocaust also appears in films made in the years after World War II, in prestate Israel. The early Holocaust films were produced in the late 1940s and 1950s.6 The second wave came in the 1980s and 1990s, in what we have named elsewhere “shadow cinema.”7 We argued there that those films’ attitudes to Holocaust survivors was characterized by guilt feelings stemming from several sources— but mainly the inaction of the Jewish community in Palestine when the first news about the annihilation reached them. Holocaust historians, such as Dina Porat and Shabtai Beit-Zvi,8 argue that the Zionist leadership did not want Jews to be rescued by being sent anywhere other than to Palestine. Another explanation for the guilt stems from the apparent existence of a cause and effect relationship between the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel. The source of guilt may emanate from the eternal debt that Israelis owe to the victims who perished in the Holocaust.9 Moreover, we argue that Holocaust guilt in Israeli society has another source. At the conceptual level, Zionist ideology held that “The Diaspora Jew” should be transformed to “The New Jew,” and that in order to achieve this goal, millions of Jews must emigrate from Europe to “the Land of Israel.” In other words, Zionism’s principal objective was to “Liquidate the Diaspora.” Tragically, the Nazi Final Solution did lead to the liquidation of the European Jewish Diaspora. The concept of “Liquidating the Diaspora,” a phrase coined in Zionist parlance before the break of World War II, alongside the horrific events in which the Nazis annihilated European Jews, engendered guilt in pre-statehood Israel concerning Holocaust victims.10 A reverse osmosis took place when a sense of Holocaust guilt filtered into the coming generations of Israelis that expressed itself in the 2000s new wave of Holocaust films. However, in contradistinction and unlike the second-wave films that are marked by guilt, the third-wave of Holocaust films

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of the 2000s are a combination of guilt and shame.11 It is commonly accepted that in a state of post-trauma, the traumatic images are perceived as an “iconic” memory that pursues the victim in flashbacks, dreams, and day-dreaming.12 In the third-wave Israeli Holocaust feature films, visual representations of the tangible Holocaust are actualized through a series of images of anxiety, even horror, images that sometimes possess only a partial affinity with the events of the Holocaust as they occurred in the past. The relationship between guilt and shame in these films is a complex one that gets expressed in different phenomena and within different contexts. In his seminal work on the concept of “aidos” in ancient Greece, Douglas L. Cairns maintains that the distinction between shame and guilt lies in the difference between the existence of an inner sanction regarding guilt, and the application of an external sanction regarding shame.13 Guilt is created following an inner sanction that peoples’ consciousness imposes on their emotions. Conversely, the sense of shame is created following an external sanction; that is, people aware of and observing specific behavior by a specific individual who refuses to accept the behavior or have reservations about it. This “non-approving” look of others evokes the subject’s sense of shame. However, Cairns also believes that distinction to be incomplete. Like guilt, shame too stems from an inner sanction. For people to feel shamed by their actions, a real audience is not necessary. At the same time, even when an external gaze criticizes behavior, people can adopt or reject that shaming gaze. Shame depends less on other people’s judgment, and more on the subject’s compliance with a specific ideal self.14 The external gaze is chiefly the mirroring of an individual’s inner standard.15 Shame is an individual’s negative assessment of one’s own behavior, whether conscious or intuitive.16 The sense of shame takes shape when people fail to adapt their behavior to a certain ideal, while guilt violates an inner conscience-driven prohibition.17 Here, shame confronts the question “what sort of person am I, and what sort of person do I want to be?” Guilt concerns the individual as an agent of action, and it asks the question: “what have I done?”18 Guilt is created when there is a perceived contradiction between the moral self and a person’s action which he considers nonmoral. At the same time, Cairns notes that guilt and shame cannot be totally separated. Shame is usually felt in the wake of a specific action, while guilt always entails an individual’s reference to the image of the “ideal self.” Ruth Leys argues that while shame focuses on the self and the question of who you are, guilt focuses on a person’s actions and the question is what that person did, or

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failed to do.19 John Carroll comments20 that in the psychoanalytic approach, the distinction between shame and guilt lies in the division between the concept of an ego ideal and the realm of the consciousness. When a person senses failure in terms of the ego ideal, she is meant to feel shame. The sense of shame awakens when an individual fails in behavior, an action, or an act of omission and becomes aware of it. Being a moral response, shame can be experienced even without witnesses, and also in the absence of an imagined “being looked at.” It results from the disparity between human behavior and human self-image, and does not depend on someone else’s opinion. In contrast, guilt emerges when a person fails, disappoints, or betrays another person. The early Holocaust films, produced in prestatehood Israel, as well as those made in during first decades following the birth of the State of Israel, emphasized the motif of guilt while the films made in the 2000s emphasizes a clear motif of shame.21 In the United States, the debate over the role of shame in Holocaust discourse has been reopened in recent years.22 Previously considered a negative emotion, resembling guilt, anger, fear, hate, mourning, and humiliation, now reassessed, shame is categorized as a positive, nondestructive emotion. While guilt is thought to have clearly negative implications, shame has aspects of healing and repair. A question that arises in this context is whether a sense of tikkun exists in the latest wave of Israeli Holocaust films? In most of the 2000s films, there is however a manifest sense of shame for being a Holocaust survivor, or the offspring of one. Yet most of these films do not deal with the actual events of the Holocaust. Paradoxically, the redeeming of the physical reality of the Holocaust is likely to sever the continuing negative feelings of melancholia, and enable processes of healing and repair. Still, only one single film out of a group of eight—Spring 1941 (Uri Barbash, 2008)—does put across the screen, in a long flashback, events of the past during the Holocaust. The close reading and interpretation of the 2000s Holocaust Israeli films will allow us to better understand the issue of shame and its healing capabilities in relation to the Holocaust memory. We would like to offer a reading of the third-wave of Holocaust films, as dealing with the feeling of shame that might be missed by the more common reading that focuses on guilt alone. The characterization of the feeling of shame will be based on the various definitions that were just mentioned, in addition to philosophical writings regarding this concept. As in Cairn’s argument on aidos, we assume that in principle guilt and shame feelings cannot be totally separated, and even more so in the 2000s Holocaust films.

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Murderers among us Made in Israel (Ari Folman, 2001) The first film in this cycle addresses Nazism, and Israel’s attitude to the memory of the Holocaust and its survivors. In the snowy setting of the Golan Heights winter, several Israeli characters perpetrate random killings; their victims are other Israelis or foreigners. We watch a series of violent acts, whose victims are security personnel, tourists, and hikers—but also the hired killers themselves. In a dance macabre of sorts, one after the other the film’s characters get killed. Driving this dance of death and maybe also heralding the vengeance film Inglorious Basterds, is the character of “the Nazi beast.” In the film’s fantasy, Israel is about to sign a peace agreement with Syria. Prior to the signing ceremony, a Nazi war-criminal living in Syria is being transferred to Israel. He will be driven in a closed security vehicle from the Golan Heights to Jerusalem, to stand trial for his crimes during the Holocaust. A rich businessman whose family perished in the Holocaust believes that the judicial system is incapable of meting out justice, and plans his own private vengeance. For that purpose, he recruits two separate teams of hit-men, whose task is kidnapping the Nazi from the hands of the Israeli security unit, and then executing him in the tycoon’s presence in a mysterious location in the Golan Heights known as the “Mountain of Mars.” As the action unfolds, there are many acts of killing—of security personnel and passers-by—all mechanically performed by the hired killers, with no expressions of sentiment. The arbitrary murders evoke associations of Nazi conduct in World War II, as presented in renowned films like Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) and The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002). Toward the end of the film, when the killers and the security personnel are all dead, the Nazi is taken to the site of his execution, while the person who ordered the operation watches from a distance. He is tied to a post and given a loaded pistol, and later we hear the sound of a distant gunshot. Another character, the trumpet-player Eddie, provides a central axis in the film. Eddie makes a living by playing the Last Post on his trumpet at ceremonies for the fallen. He joins the band of hired killers by chance; they believe he can help them track down the Nazi beast. In contrast to most of the film’s characters, Eddie doesn’t kill anyone and remains alive. He is the last survivor and it is Eddie who brings the Nazi to his place of execution on the Mountain of Mars. During the film, his trumpet-playing projects an elegiac quality: he plays melancholy

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tunes while the “made in Israel” dance of death unfolds around him. That ruthless killing of Israelis by Israelis, around the affair of the “last Nazi,” triggers off associations with the Nazi death-machine that functioned with a total lack of shame. The Nazis killed a few people, and masses of people, in broad daylight, watched by collaborators and indifferent witnesses—soldiers and civilians, Germans and other nationalities—who participated shamelessly in the most brutal acts. On a smaller scale, though still iconic, that behavior is presented in the film Made in Israel—except that here Israelis are both murderers and victims, and in this context the last Nazi symbolizes the “shameful origin”23 of the Israelis’ behavior. Whoever commits them, all acts of slaughter demonstrate the body’s physicality, and consequently the losing control over the body as an essential element of shame.24 Moreover, the arbitrariness of the acts of killings raises to the surface the sense of shame in the audience. Giorgio Agamben’s story of Antelme25 explains this connection. He writes about an Italian student who was randomly called out by an SS officer from the line of prisoners on a death-march from Buchenwald to Dachau at the end of the war. The young student blushed, a red flush that Antelme thought revealed shame. Agamben tries to elucidate why this happened, and says that the student must have felt ashamed for being randomly selected to be killed.26 He refers to the final chapter of Kafka’s book The Trial, when Joseph K. is about to “die like a dog”; as the moment of death approaches, shame wells up in him.27 One can assume that Joseph K.’s sense of shame originates from his being revealed in all his physicality, “like a dog” that is shameless in the sense that it does not hide or cover its excreta. The Nazis’ random killings, the victims’ total loss of control over themselves at the moment of death—this is the greatest intimacy, occurring close to the moment of death. In Made in Israel, juxtaposed with the murderers’ lack of shame, and indifference to guilt, Eddie looks entirely different. In the gang of eccentrics, he is the only person who expresses both shame and guilt. Eddie’s musical instruments link him to the guilt motif connected to the name and dynasty of Cain in the Hebrew Bible. God rebukes Cain for murdering his brother Abel. Cain admits his guilt saying “My punishment is greater than I can bear” (Gen. 4.13). Cain’s descendant, Jubal, was “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ” (Gen. 4.21). Eddie’s trumpet-playing associated with the sense of guilt accompanies the events of the film and brings to mind the humanistic aspect that most of the characters in the film lack. Traces of Nazism and the Holocaust abound in the surrealistic plot of Made in Israel. But while the motif of guilt was a clear focus of the 1980s Holocaust films,28

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here the motif is different. Made in Israel portrays a society whose violence is a matter of routine. The link between “the Nazi beast” and the pointless murders points at the “shameful origin” of violence in Israeli society. After the Holocaust, Israel accepted reparations from Germany that furnished huge material support in the first years of statehood. The lives of the Holocaust’s victims, and the suffering of its survivors, constituted a lever for the state’s initial development in its first decades. The association in the film between the presence of “The Nazi beast” and the violence imbued in Israeli society highlights the Israelis’ affinity to Nazi brutality. In Made in Israel the Israeli bullies are not “inglorious bastards” setting out on a campaign of revenge against the Nazis, but a bunch of shameless murderers.

Why can’t the German learn to speak? Walk on Water (Eytan Fox, 2004) The title of the film Walk on Water expresses the unachievable. Eyal, a Mossad agent sent to Germany to hunt down and kill a Nazi war-criminal considers it an impossible mission. In order to execute it, he has to befriend the Nazi’s grandson, an amiable young gay man called Axel who is currently visiting Israel. Eyal acts as Axel’s tour-guide, creates ties with him, and obtains information about the whereabouts of his grandfather. At the film’s start, Eyal carries out another mission in Istanbul, where he assassinates a young Palestinian. Asked to “terminate with extreme prejudice” he indeed executes his deadly mission very professionally, in a precise and unemotional manner. Is his next mission harder because, unlike the Istanbul assignment, it looks like a revenge mission: the Nazi he is ordered to kill is no longer a threat. In the farewell letter that Eyal’s wife wrote before she committed suicide, she said that Eyal was incapable of feeling. His commander in the Mossad gives him the new mission, believing that he now needs a change in his routine for the working through of his personal loss. To assassinate the old Nazi, he must develop friendly relationships with two young Germans, Axel and his sister Pia, the grandchildren of the Nazi war criminal who however have little contact with their grandfather. The two acts of murder in the film—the assassination of the Palestinian at the beginning of the film and the strangling of the old Nazi at the end—create a perplexing analogy between the war against the Palestinians and the pursuit of Nazi criminals. Other elements in the film recur in its parts, reinforcing the

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duality motif: events in Israel and events that take place in Germany, such as, the Israeli folk dances at the kibbutz at the film’s beginning, also take place at the party in Axel’s home in Berlin. Performing the song “Kiss me” on two occasions, scenes in pubs, then walking on the water in the Dead Sea, first, on the beach at the Dead Sea, and again at the ending of the film in Eyal’s dream. A particular cinematic frame illustrates the parallels in a close-up on two rolls lying on a plate served in a Berlin kiosk. The noir quality is suggested in several shots, such as in Eyal walking along the corridor before he discovers his wife is dead, in the conversation on the subway, or when at the party, the wheel-chaired old Nazi enters along with the birthday cake. This duality motif refers to ambivalence that characterizes the film noir. Here an ambivalence about gender identity is also evoked by a scene in the subway when a group of transvestites is attacked by violent skinheads. Likewise, it is also present in a kibbutz scene where Axel performs during a “young talents evening” in which he plays two roles—one a man’s, the other a woman’s, until his sister joins in and they sing along together. Another noir motif is “the walking dead,” manifest in the absent persona of Eyal’s dead wife, a sort of a Jungian shadow. In the final scene, that echoes the killing of the Palestinian man in the opening scene, there is a visible change in Eyal’s behavior. His former indifference to the crying Palestinian child who sees his father falling dead after Eyal stabs him with an injection needle, is now “transformed” to hugging and calming his crying child. Like the phrase “walk on water” we now witness the impossible: Eyal’s child is the Nazi war-criminal’s great-grandchild. Not only did he fail to kill the Nazi himself, he has married his granddaughter and created kinship between the murderer and the murdered, between a Nazi war criminal and a Jew son of Holocaust survivors. Does this unthinkable amalgamation imply that the German memory can now disengage from guilt for the Holocaust? Yet the film’s focus is not on issues of guilt but on dealing with shame and its motifs of concealment and hiding. Derrida writes that shame is an emotion generated through the eyes,29 and that the response of shame is expressed in the lowering of the gaze.30 In the film’s first part, Eyal conceals his real identity. He is monitoring the moves of the German brother and sister in Israel. His identity as a Mossad agent is only revealed in the second part of the plot while he is in Germany. The turnabout in the plot, and simultaneously in the Holocaust narrative, occurs in the subway scene when Eyal fights and overcomes the group of violent neo-Nazis skinheads who attack Axel’s gay friends.

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Once his cover is blown, Eyal becomes incapable of performing the killing himself and he passes it on to Axel. In a paradoxical act, Axel softly strokes his grandfather’s face, then suffocates him. Eyal watches him from the side, and this is perhaps how he becomes powerfully linked to the brother and sister—by guilt feelings, which led Axel to end his own grandfather’s life, but also by shame feelings. In this scene, for the first time in the film, Eyal is crying. According to Boaz Hagin,31 the multiple structure of the movie does not indicate what could have caused this change in Eyal. He suggests that this crying is a perverse pleasure of powerlessness associated with bursting into tears. This act is embarrassing for adult male subjects who feel they need to maintain their sense of self-control. This embarrassment takes even greater extent regarding Eyal’s status. Raz Yosef32 explains that Eyal, the native-born Sabra, is an extension of the Israeli militant masculine heterosexual tradition. This tradition is an integral part of the Zionist effort to forget the traumatic and “shameful” past of the Jews in the Holocaust. Even though Eyal did not experience that past in a direct way, it nevertheless defines his male identity. Yosef notes33 that Axel, who represented a “feminine” threat, and thus triggered the memory of Eyal’s parents, himself switches off his grandfather’s oxygen supply, since Eyal is unable to complete the act. Eyal has thus prepared the way for Axel to redeem himself: he is no longer the German effeminate victim and is now able to fight his own battle. After the “parents’” trauma has been healed, Eyal can place himself in the position of the victimized child and weeps for the first time. Ultimately, though, those links lead to a new shameful action, the birth of a child with Pia, the German, and creating a living memory of her Nazi grandfather. The concealment motif resides in the scene in Jerusalem’s Old City market. Eyal is irritated by Axel’s squandering money and shows him how to haggle with the Palestinian salesman over the high price he’s asking for a sheepskin coat. Here, the Jacob and Esau motif is introduced. In the biblical story Isaac feels Jacob’s arm, which is covered in goatskins, and tells his son: “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau” (Gen. 27.22). The book Legends of the Bible34 says that while Esau obeyed his father’s order to go hunting to provide meat, his mother Rebecca placed strips of goat-kid’s skin on Jacob’s arm, creating a disguise that would conceal his true identity from his blind father. In this context, Yeshayahu Leibowitz maintains that “because Jacob obtained what he did in a not straightforward way, this matter cannot be forgiven either by him or by his descendants.”35 From now on the Israelites, descendants of Jacob

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the Father of the nation, must atone perpetually for his act of deception. In the myth of the eternal return, that Mircea Eliade has described,36 Time is cyclical, a ritual of regeneration and rebirth that undermines the pillars of linear time: thus humans are destined to repeat their past. If this were true, the Jewish people’s tribulations could be seen as constant attempt to atone for Jacob’s deception in stealing his brother’s birthright, and falsely obtaining Isaac’s blessing. And yet, that model of punishment for a shameful primordial sin does not fit with the events of the Holocaust. In historical memory and historiography the Holocaust is conceived as a singular, extra-historical event, surely not part of a cyclical regeneration of a remote past. The act of deception causes Isaac to grant Jacob the blessing intended for Esau. Isaac’s blessing of Esau is: “God give thee of the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine” (Gen. 27.28). Leibowitz argues that this is a request to be eternally moral and he cites Rashi: “Why is the Divine Name used here? To teach that He will treat you with justice. If you deserve it, He will give to you, and if not, He will not give to you. [. . . ] Isaac’s blessing of Jacob thus has a double meaning: Jacob does receive Isaac’s blessing, a noble and sublime one; but. It is conditional and Jacob must be worthy of receiving it. Thus it is a conditional blessing.” As a true or mythic descendant of Jacob-Israel, Eyal must uphold the demand to act morally. But at the very start he kills a man in cold blood while his child watches. The child’s gaze reveals him as a murderer—guilty of the death of the Palestinian father. The look of the murdered man’s child brands Eyal with the mark of shame. From then on, shame will force him to conceal and hide himself. Agamben37 writes that “In this reciprocity of active and passive vision, aidos resembles the experience of being present at one’s own being seen, being taken as a witness by what one sees. (. . .) whoever experiences shame is overcome by his own being subject to vision; he must respond to what deprives him of speech.” The gaze of the murdered Palestinian’s son renders Eyal aware of his actions and creates profound inner shame in him, reflected in his attempts to conceal his identity as a Mossad hitman. His shame is triggered not only by the act itself, but also by the method used. Eyal plunges a needle into the victim’s body, creating an intimate contact between the two bodies, the murderer’s and the victim’s. The poison he injects acts as a physiological intervention in the body’s functioning, and thus transforms the victim’s body to an object. When he sticks the needle into the man’s body, Eyal, the subject of that act, becomes at the same time also an object, as being a witness of death and for a moment merging with the dead body. Through that act Eyal confronts shame. Reading Emmanuel Levinas,

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Agamben38 comments that “To be ashamed means to be consigned to something that cannot be assumed. But what cannot be assumed is not something external. Rather, it originates in our own intimacy; it is what is most intimate in us (for example, our own physiological life).” As Eyal injects poison into a body that reacts to the poison, shame takes shape:39 “In shame, the subject has no other content than its own desubjectification; it becomes witness to its own disorder, its own oblivion as a subject. This double movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification, is shame.” When Eyal inflicts death and at the same time witnesses the moment of death, he himself transforms from subject to object and back—this very transition constitutes the moment of shame. Toward the ending, Eyal discards his cover story and reveals that he is a Mossad agent. However, in the mission of killing the Nazi war-criminal, he must confront a dispute that does not occur in the present, and exists primarily as a historical memory. “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau” and—in its contemporary reincarnation—Eyal an Israeli Jew, is the “voice of Jacob” while Axel the Nazi’s grandson represents the “hands of Esau.” And yet their behavior attests that the opposite is true: Eyal commits a cold-blooded “targeted killing” of a young Palestinian, while the victim’s child watches, while Axel is presented throughout the plot as a humane individual. It is only in the final scene that both of them regain their “right place.” Eyal marries Axel’s sister, the Nazi’s grandchild. The baby cradled in Eyal’s arms is, on his father’s side, an Israeli Jew who will have to assume the burden of the shame inherent in targeted killings: on his mother’s side he is a German who must accept the burden of his Nazi great-grandfather’s shame. The implications are that there is a dual, shameful origin in the lineage of Eyal’s and Pia’s children.

She owns the Holocaust The Debt (Assaf Bernstein, 2007) The plot of the film The Debt is structured from two affairs in the past: the first took place in the 1960s, the second in the 1990s. In the 1960s, Rachel is a young Holocaust survivor, a Mossad agent who works as a team with two men, Zvi and Ehud in a planned operation to track down a Nazi war-criminal and bring him to trial in Israel. Known as “the surgeon of Birkenau” this man is a gynecologist who performed experiments on concentration camp inmates. In the 1990s,

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Rachel is now renowned as the heroine who killed the Nazi war-criminal, and has also written a book about the affair. Zvi, confined to a wheelchair, sends her to Kiev to meet another agent, Yehuda, and their joint mission is to kill “the surgeon of Birkenau” because in reality the first assassination attempt failed and the Nazi criminal was still alive. As in Made in Israel, there are numerous references in the film to the Eichmann Trial. In a bolt-hole, Rachel the Mossad agent tells the Nazi doctor: “We’ll take you to the State of the Jews, and put you behind a glass partition so no one can kill you. You’ll sit there and say you were only obeying orders. You’ll say it wasn’t you. But whatever you say won’t change a thing, because at the end of the trial we’ll put a noose round your neck and hang you.” The mission resembles the one in Walk on Water: tracking down an aged Nazi war-criminal and killing him with a lethal injection. The multiplication of elements appears in various scenes in the film, many also presenting duality related to the characters: Zvi the mossad agent gets wounded twice, in the past when he hit the Nazi, and in the present during a terrorist attack in an embassy; the duality also resonates when Rachel and Ehud announce from a phone-booth in a pub that they’ve caught the Nazi, and when we hear applause at the other end of the line, we also hear applause of the people in the pub. Rachel is wounded twice by a broken glass: the first time she breaks a champagne glass and for fleeting moment she wonders whether to cut herself; the second time, at the end of the film, she struggles with the Nazi and shatters the bathroom mirror. In two instances we see a blade used to perform a killing: the first time it is a razor-blade, left behind in the bathroom—the Nazi grabs it and slashes Rachel’s face, leaving it scarred; the second time it’s a knife that Rachel hid before pursuing the Nazi. Two love-stories offer another instance of doubling:—between Rachel and Zvi, and between Rachel and Ehud. A Holocaust survivor without family or friends, Zvi is incapable of responding to Rachel’s love. She find consolation in Ehud, who hints to her that Zvi would never be able to accept her. The Nazi doctor also has a double: a newspaper item tells about a man claiming that he is the “surgeon from Birkenau.” But in retrospect we learn that the Nazi criminal confessed his past to that man, who later suffered a stroke and claimed, in a state of confusion, that he was the Nazi war-criminal. The motif of “the double” (doppelganger) is familiar from German expressionist film, and later in film noir. In The Debt, the noir visual effect takes the form of many shadows and oblique lines in many dark frames. The various multiplied and repeating visual and narrative elements emphasize the situation

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that entraps the characters. Like spider webs, the lattices signify that there is no way out and no hope of extricating themselves from the situation. It is illustrated in the scene where Zvi and Rachel part in the car at the airport. Zvi gives her the syringes and she gets out of the car demonstrably, without closing the door. He is handicapped so cannot get out to shut the car-door: it is a typical situation of being trapped. The open door cannot be closed; 30 years later, living all that time in a lie still affects them, until it sends them on their final mission, and to their deaths. The duality motif becomes particularly explicit and powerful in the closing sequence, with the violent struggle between Rachel and the Nazi doctor. As she enters the bathroom, she sees four mirrors in front of her. Then the figure of the Nazi appears behind her, and is mirrored four times. The journey to trap the Nazi war-criminal is strewn with duplications and doubling, but by the film’s end the doubling disintegrates. Rachel breaks the mirror in the bathroom, and after shattering this means for duplicating reality, she succeeds in killing the “surgeon from Birkenau,” exactly as she has written in her book: “with the last shreds of strength she struggled with him, and then lost consciousness.” In order to break through the dual sense of reality one must destroy the tool that duplicates, and she does so: by breaking the reflecting mirror. In contrast, Rachel herself represents not a duplication but a combination of male and female. When she goes to the Nazi gynecologist in his fertility clinic, purporting to be a patient but in fact scheming to kill him, she creates a link between fertility and murder. Apparently imprisoned by his hands as she lies on the examination table, she suddenly imprisons him between her encircling legs, injects him with a sedative and causes him to lose his consciousness. His head falls between her legs, and from the camera extreme high angle, the picture resembles a scene of giving birth—his head emerges from between her thighs. When Rachel fell in love with Zvi and he rejected her, she realized what dependence on a man entails. The two men in her Mossad team gave her instructions for the operation. In the second part of the plot, set in the 1990s, there is an inversion: the men have become helpless, Zvi is confined to a wheelchair, and Ehud—unable to deal with the situation—commits suicide in the bathroom. Only the elderly Rachel summons up courage and continues her mission. The duality that dominated her life has now ended. Throughout the whole plot of the film, she functions both as a man and as a woman. She sews the men’s suits, she attacks and traps the Nazi criminal doctor, she shaves his face, and she also spoon-feeds him cereal like a mother with an infant.

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In her dual role, feminine and masculine her figure is associated with the Uroborus, the mythological snake that swallows its own tail. Erich Neumann40 notes that according to Carl Jung, the Uroborus is a cyclical snake that swallows its tail, coils around itself, and is simultaneously male and female—impregnating the female, but also giving birth. The Uroborus is a primeval symbol of unity that contains the male and female opposites, and represents the female archetype, the source of life that is found in the unconscious of every individual, female and male. In prehistory, the link between sexuality and giving birth was unknown, and the woman was perceived as autonomous and not dependent on a man to create life: the roles of both father and mother were attributed to her. Indeed, Rachel performs both roles, and later in the film she illustrates the link created between fertility and murder in the clinic: in graphic terms she “gives birth” to the Nazi, then murders him. In his book The Fear of the Feminine,41 Neumann emphasizes the ties between the matriarchal consciousness and the figure of the egg; as he calls it “the cycle of the ovum.” At the heart of the matriarchal Uroborus is a moon that illuminates the surrounding darkness: this image is intensified in the character of the young Rachel, with several shadowy close-ups emphasizing her face that radiates light like a moon. At the end of the film, Rachel herself becomes a sort of moon when she falls unconscious on the floor in a railway-station, surrounded by a circle of onlookers. In Jungian iconography, the character of Rachel signifies not only the Uroborus that grants life, but also the “terrible mother” that brings death. The ring of bystanders surrounding her body lying on the platform is shown in long-shot, like a gaping mouth in mythology, that swallows its children. In the myth of the “terrible female” she threatens to devour the hero and return him by force to the womb, thus ensuring his death. To escape the terrible mother’s embrace and destroy her, the hero sets out to fight a dragon or an underground monster associated with her. The battle always entails horror and anxiety, and ultimately awakens guilt feelings too. In the film The Debt, fighting the war-criminal embodies abjection. There are several physical phenomena in the film, such as the gynecological examination, the push-ups that Ehud performs, and the blood spraying over the Nazi doctor’s face. Unlike guilt, which an individual is aware of as an emotion concerning someone else, shame is considered a spontaneous reaction, almost wholly a physiological reflex.42 Rachel is undeterred by the physical presence and proximity of the materials of abjection. Of the three Mossad agents in the hit team, she alone lays herself open to injury and death in order to effect her killing mission. In the first part of the plot, she comes

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to the Nazi gynecologist’s clinic as a patient, and undergoes a gynecological examination. Then at the ending in their violent struggle in the bathroom she murders him, escapes wounded, and then collapses from loss of blood. She has an intimate relation with abjection, and with despised bodily materials. She wipes her face after the Nazi spits at her, and cleans the blood from his face. She props herself on a trashcan in the backyard of the old-age home. In contrast, it is the Nazi gynecologist—who is close to abjection both due to his profession and his horrific wartime acts—who is repulsed. And his contempt is mixed with his admiration for the Jews, who restrained themselves from acts of killing, from intimate contact with bodies: “You never knew how to kill, only to be killed.” Rachel deals with the shame of the lie in which she was involved in the 1960s, when her Mossad team lied and reported that the Nazi had been killen when in reality he escaped them, and their operation had failed. Years later, she is tortured by shame and embarks on a personal mission to correct the record and kill the fugitive war-criminal. If Rachel is the “terrible mother” who gives birth to the Nazi and then his death, the Nazi must fight her violently. At the end of the day, Rachel’s mission succeeds and she butchers him with a knife and a broken glass, a deed with overtones of human sacrifice rituals. A ceremony of this kind was held in ancient Greece, and was symbolized by the Uroborus. Rachel’s murder of the Nazi illustrates the myth that she and her partners created around the operation, that brought her fame. In her book Auschwitz as the Kingdom of Faust: The Death of Human Sacrifices,43 Rivka Shechter parallels the Jews’ annihilation in the Holocaust with rituals of human sacrifice. She argues that Auschwitz provided a stage for Satan, and that—for the Nazis—the Jews played the role of the primal sinner. In the sphere of myth, she maintains, the Nazis believed that sacrificing Jews would redeem the world, and for that purpose they signed a pact with Satan. The ritual of human sacrifice was aimed at placating Satan, with the hope that they themselves would not become the victims. Ultimately the trains dispatched to Auschwitz and the sacrifice of the Jews apparently did not satisfy Mephisto, who finally did destroy Germany. The Jews were meant to substitute for the Germans but this failed, and Germany was destroyed. The myth of the substitution of the Germans corresponds with another myth of substitution—between Jacob and Esau; and the name “Rachel” also alludes to the biblical connection with Jacob. Like in the film Walk on Water, where Eyal and his German friend Axel switch the roles of Jacob and Esau, the film The Debt also features a substitution between killer and killed. Rachel, the Mossad agent who is not repulsed by

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contact with abject materials, herself becomes a corpse. The struggle to the death in the bathroom between her and the Nazi physician, resonates with symbolic struggles that unfold in shame. Agamben contends44 that “It [shame] is nothing less than the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign.” Throughout the whole film, the relationship between Rachel and the Nazi gynecologist is that of a subject-sovereign. Initially she is his patient, his subject, and even when he is locked in a small apartment while she spoon-feeds him cereal, he spits it in her face and manages to escape. The balance of power is inverted at the end of the film, with the violent struggle in the bathroom of the old-age home where he is hiding out. Rachel becomes “the sovereign” and the Nazi is transformed into “the subject” and she founders in a state of shame. She kills him with her hands, and he collapses onto the bathroom floor—a corpse. There is a hint in this deed that the Nazi’s perception of the Jews as contemptible material was wrong. Rachel slashes him with a shard of glass and turns him into a corpse which, as we have noted, is an abjection of the highest order.45 Later she escapes from the building, collapses like a wounded animal on the railway platform and dies. After the graphic illustration of the Nazi’s birth/death, she concludes her mission by herself getting killed. The Jewish Nazi-hunter ends her life by emulating the life-cycle of the Uroborus—the dragon that gives birth and also brings death.

Sucking it up—sinking it in Burning Mooki (Lena Chaplin and Slava Chaplin, 2008) The film Burning Mooki is an initiation story of a teenager whose life is overshadowed by his mother and uncle, both Holocaust survivors. The story begins with a flashback of the adult Mooki, now living with his wife and child in Norway. A phone-call tells him that his mother has died: while he debates whether or not to fly to Israel for the funeral, the curtain rises on his adolescence in Israel. With the sudden death of Mooki’s father, while he was a child, his uncle, a coarse womanizer who survived the Holocaust by doing business with the Nazis, takes on the role of father. Mooki is surrounded by Holocaust survivors and lives among their experiences; he is present at their parties where they “ate like pigs and drank like Gentiles,” while in the evenings he watches a Holocaust

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survivor, standing with her big dog by his apartment block, who bitterly cries “Mama!” to the moon. He watches Holocaust movies, and sees his first sights of female nudity there. After the sudden death in the family, his widowed young mother starts a relationship with his uncle toward whom Mooki feels repulsion and fury. She acts toward Mooki with insensitivity, interferes in his relationships with girls of his age, and chases away a neighborhood girl whom Mooki falls in love with. Later he has a relationship with another girl who like himself is rejected by her peers. She has a tough look, and a threatening older brother. At home Mooki enjoys no privacy. His uncle behaves crudely to him and forces the boy to soap his uncle’s back in the shower. When Mooki himself is naked in the bathtub, his mother walks in without knocking. The boundaries between permissible and prohibited are crossed, and this reaches the lowest point in a frequently repeated ceremony: Mooki stands in the building’s elevator and urinates. Sometime later, when his good friend joins the army, Mooki freaks out until he moves from home, lives alone in a rundown rented room, and becomes addicted to drugs. Like in The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974), the imminent implicit? promiscuity entangled with Nazi paraphernalia leads him to have sex with his mother. At a party of Holocaust survivors in their apartment his mother sings the song “The Shtetl is Burning: It’s burning brothers, burning! Our shtetl is burning! Our shtetl is burning completely, evil winds full of anger, rage and ravage, smash and shatter, leaving charred and empty walls, it’s burning!”46 This is the source of Burning Mooki—the contemptuous nickname that he’s labeled with. Several times his mother behaves seductively with him, while her new partner, his uncle, tries to rape Mooki’s girlfriend, indirectly arousing memories of the sexual abuse of young Jewish girls by SS officers. His mother’s seductiveness, allied with memories of sexual abuse during the Holocaust, reaches a peak in the scene where Mooki has sex with his mother. Afterwards, he slaps her and then takes out an SS uniform from the closet that belongs to his uncle who boasts that with his own hands he killed its original owner, a Nazi officer. In Freudian terms the son murders the father in order to take the mother. In the movie, the father dies, and a substitute father emerges. The substitute father tries to take Mooki’s girlfriend, and then Mooki goes to take his uncle’s lover—his own mother. After he sleeps with his mother, he puts on the SS officer’s uniform and shouts “Heil Hitler” on the street. After the Oedipal act of the incest with his mother, Mooki gives himself the appearance of a Nazi, and sees himself as tainted by Nazi sexual abuse. Another link between sexuality and the Holocaust appears

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in the scene where two women discuss the good looks of Dr Mengele, the Nazi war-criminal. In an attempt to extinguish the “burning” fire—both the sexual heat and the searing memories of the Holocaust that his mother ignites within him—Mooki takes the familiar step of adolescent behavior: urinating in a public place. But instead of extinguishing a campfire by urinating on it, as kids do, he urinates in the elevator of an apartment block where many tenants are Holocaust survivors. By this act, with its attendant sense of flow, Mooki regresses to the pre-Oedipal stage that expresses sadistic contempt toward those around him.47 Mooki sinks to contemptible acts like pissing in an elevator and incest with his mother and ultimately he applies to himself society’s customary attitude toward despicable deeds—he retreats, out of bounds, and distances himself to life on the social margins. Julia Kristeva argues that a corpse is located at the highest stage on the scale of abjection as the most impure and contemptible object. Mooki encounters corpses twice; first, when his father suddenly dies from a heart attack, and second—the corpse of his friend’s father who shoots himself in the head. In his friend’s apartment, Mooki bends over the father’s corpse and pulls the chain from his neck, and his hands become bloodstained. After his friend tells him that his father had kept the chain during the Holocaust and refused to exchange it even for food, for Mooki this chain becomes an emblem of survival in the Holocaust. In that act—stealing the chain of survival—there is an association with his own sense of shame as the child of a Holocaust survivor. Abjection concerning a corpse seems to be associated here with his mother’s sexual seductiveness. The chain can be considered a sort of fetish, adding to the fetish that recurs frequently in the film—his mother’s foot. In one scene, Mooki responds to her request to varnish her toenails. One after the other, the fetishistic objects—the chain and his mother’s foot—disintegrate. His soldier friend visits him in his rented room, and tells him that the chain had nothing to do with the Holocaust but was bought for a few pennies in a Tel Aviv market. In response, Mooki leaves his rundown rented room and goes to his home, performs the ceremony of urinating in the elevator and then follows this with the shaming act—having sex with his mother. In his self-perception, the closeness between the memory of the Holocaust, reflected in the story about the chain, and seduction by his mother, transforms him into a Nazi. His reaction is to dress himself in the SS uniform hanging in the closet, the property of his uncle/his mother’s lover. Punishment soon comes, when he gets caught up in a fight with a gang that beat him up mercilessly; if his hated uncle hadn’t arrived at the cafe and saved him,

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Mooki could have been killed. The film opens with a sense of guilt, with the moment when he hears about his mother’s death, while he is far away in Norway: his first reaction is: “I didn’t kill mother, I’m not guilty of what happened,” and it ends with a sense of shame over the incestuous act. As a member of the Holocaust “second generation,” Mooki is tainted with a sort of acquired post-traumatic condition with intolerable guilt feelings. Leys notes that after World War II, guilt had a major place in the experience of extermination camp survivors. The psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim, who survived Dachau and Buchenwald, argues that this feeling stems from their having survived while so many other people died before their eyes.48 In this case, feelings of guilt are linked to the victim’s association with the aggressor. It is a case of mimesis, where the victim imitates the aggressor, but directs the aggression toward himself. Agamben adds that the survivors’ guilt feelings also stemmed from their joy on being saved from death, but he believes that the two positions are not exclusive or distant from each other: “They are the two faces of the living being’s incapacity truly to separate innocence and guilt—that is, somehow to master its own shame.”49 He later comments that in Auschwitz, everyone died and lived instead of someone else, without reason. Therefore Auschwitz signifies that human beings cannot find another meaning for death other than that flush, that countenance which we call “shame;” “The flush is like a mute apostrophe flying through time to reach us, to bear witness to him.” According to Agamben,50 the brooding sense of guilt in Mooki’s mother and her fellow-survivors derives from attempts to get to the heart of the shame, and the sense of shame has been passed on to Mooki. As the son of Holocaust survivors, guilt feeling are imprinted in him, and he wonders “who did mother have to kill to stay alive . . .” Leys contends that for survivors, remaining alive is linked to guilt, because of the gnawing question: “what did I do to survive?” As soon as the survivor focuses on the question whether he was a coward or weak, ultimately his experience will be one of shame.51 In normal life, a corpse and its unseen metamorphosis from subject to object always generates a sense of shame. For the inmates of the camps, however, shame also resulted from their characteristically blunted feelings at the sight of the corpses around them. In comparison with the survivors’ shame, Mooki’s uncle is typified as a man “with no shame” or in other words, lacking a conscience: in order to confront the Nazis, he closed deals with them and apparently even went over to their side, to an extent. In the film’s opening shot, we see Mooki’s mother sitting on the window-ledge on a high floor of the building as if she’s about to plunge to

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her death. In this, she symbolizes the existential condition of “on the edge,” the liminal condition that Mooki himself must always cope with. It also signifies the mother’s death, which is announced in the scene in the adult Mooki’s home in Norway. That news ignites the flame of memory and drives the story of the flashback that constitutes the film’s main plot. After his “shameful act,” only one course is open to him—running as far as possible and hiding himself in chilly Norway52 to cool down that “burning” in him. The closing scene reverts to the frame story, his Norwegian wife asks why he’s turned off the heating. Mooki replies that he’s decided not to fly to Israel for his mother’s funeral, and thus appears to be chilling her memory. Like the end of the film Walk on Water, Burning Mooki also ends with the picture of the main protagonist with his child. But while Walk on Water presents a fighting hero, Mooki never enlists, doesn’t fight, but leads a life of a traditional Jewish existence—a vagabond life and seeking a new identity. Burning Mooki becomes an extinguished man, a sort of “brand plucked from the burning”—the nickname given to Holocaust survivors in Israel. Like Oedipus who could not escape his destiny, Mooki has the sign of Cain on his forehead and guilt feelings again mingle with a sense of shame. The burning Mooki escapes to a place where the memory of collaboration with the Nazis is imprinted, and cannot escape his fate—caused by his own private shameful act, but also the shame of being a second-generation Holocaust survivor.

Some came back, some went running Spring 1941 (Uri Barbash, 2008) The films described so far are set in the post-Holocaust period, and are focusing on stories of second-generation characters (Made in Israel, Walk on Water, The Debt, and Burning Mooki). In Contrast, Spring 1941—a filmed adaptation of two stories by Ida Fink—contains representations of historical events as they unfold; not as invented memories (as in the film Metallic Blues [Dan “Nokio” Verete, 2004]) but as memories embodied in the film. Compared with representations of reality in the eyes of omniscient narrators as in Schindler’s List, in Spring 1941 much of the film’s plot is projected from the memory of a survivor, who tells her story in flashback. But alongside the frame-story of the protagonist’s trip to Poland to give a concert, and the character’s memories of the Holocaust, the film also redeems the past by presenting it from the point of view of an omniscient narrator.

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Three principal characters take part in the story: Clara, a cellist who is invited to Poland to give a concert; her husband Arthur, a physician exterminated in the Holocaust; and Emilia, a Polish peasant in whose home Clara, Arthur, and their little girl find refuge. Arthur does not look Jewish, and Emilia presents him in the village as her cousin. Very soon the two fall in love and Arthur lives a double life: in Emilia’s home, and up above in the attic with his wife and their little daughter. A neighboring farmer in love with Emilia suspects Arthur and threatens to turn him in to the Nazis. Emilia and Arthur murder the farmer, burying his body in a field near the house. When the two women meet in the present, Emilia says nothing, keeping her secret about the child who was born from her affair with Arthur. Clara hears about it from another farmer who was Arthur’s patient, and knew that Emilia and Arthur’s son was murdered in the village in revenge for their neighbor’s murder. During Clara’s visit to the village, skeletons tumble out of the closet . . . Emilia removes from under her bed Clara’s old cello, that she has kept hidden for decades. In a scene in the village during the war, Arthur catches sight of a truck loaded with Jews. Later, from the roof of the house, he sees SS soldiers shooting the Jews at the edge of the forest. Immediately afterwards he bends down to hide himself—an action that attests equally to his shame, for he is unable to watch the killings. The silence that screams in this film is that of the daughter who stops talking from the moment that her sister is shot to death by Nazi soldiers before her eyes. Toward the end of the flashback section, Clara, Arthur, and their daughter are in a death march. The parents try to save their daughter and send her to the side of the road. But an SS man shoots and kills her on the spot. Arthur carries her body in his arms like a Pieta, and then the love triangle—Arthur in the center, his wife Clara to one side, and his lover Emilia now a bystander watching the death march on the street, from the other side. Clara says that during the mass executions in the forest, Arthur took the bullets and fell on her, saving her life. The series of revelations in the film attests to the film’s action as redeeming the reality of the Holocaust, a redemption that does not take place in other films. Derrida writes that the logic of shame is in the moment when we are exposed to the other’s gaze, even an animal’s eyes: as an example he cites his sensation when his cat watches him while he is naked. The shame he feels at that moment is also shame for being ashamed. It is a reflexive shame as if reflected in a mirror, shame that is ashamed of itself . . . And in Derrida’s words, it is a “recycled shame [. . .] a mirror image, unjustified, that cannot be admitted.” To be displayed naked to the eyes of everyone is the essence of shame.53 Leys points out that

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the subject who feels shamed is analogous to an actor suddenly transformed from a self-aware individual into an actor performing before an audience.54 In shame the specific aspect of the self, or the self-awareness becomes present. That burden of exposure arouses shame in the characters, but also in the audience perception that, through the film becomes aware of the events of the Holocaust as they occurred, in the authentic past or in the imagination. Leys refers back to Levinas who believes that the sense of shame is linked to everything we want to conceal but cannot. The films previously discussed engage with concealment and secrets, attempts to hide what causes the shame. Spring 1941 also deals with concealment, but in this case the film’s focus is the theme of exposure. It is a parallel process: exposure to the gaze of others intensifies the sense of shame, because what we tried so hard to hide can no longer be concealed. At the same time exposure itself is one step preceding the confrontation with the shame. When the family—Arthur the doctor, and Clara the musician—relocate from a big city to the village, it implies a transition from a life structured according to the norms of human culture to a life dominated by nature and drives. What actually happens here is a transition from Western culture, whose constituting foundation is the sense of guilt, to nature—where shame is the normative feeling.55 In flight from the Germans, the family abandons its prosperous bourgeois home for a peasant’s home in a remote village. From his professional status as a physician, Arthur must now do manual labor, chop trees, milk cows, and dig the soil. Clara learns how to weave. Both are now engaged in work that has an unmediated contact with the raw materials from which the world was formed before human beings touched it. Unlike the efforts of metalworkers (as in Schindler’s List), farming and cultivating the soil do not provide symbolic protection for those engaged in it. In the lap of nature, the drives predominate and so the desire of Emilia and Arthur is fulfilled without many restraints. The secrets come to light at the moment in the frame-story when now old Emilia produces an important object—Clara’s cello. In the concluding scene, Clara is playing in a concert hall in Poland. Seated before her are all the figures from the past, even those who are long dead. In this scene, the link is forged between the sense of shame and guilt feelings. Like Eddie’s trumpet in Made in Israel, Clara’s cello is associated with the motif of guilt that characterizes the lineage of Cain, whose descendant Jubal is the father of playing the violin and harp.56 In the Holocaust, a young cellist is saved by a miracle. The cello links her to Cain and to Jubal’s descendants, but at the same time it connects her to the younger brother Tubal Cain, the first metalworker.57 Analyzing the film

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Schindler’s List,58 we suggested an explanation of how, in their confrontation with the Nazi war-machine, the Jewish metalworkers enjoyed symbolic immunity. It was anchored in the mytho-historical status of people working in metallurgy, and it was thanks to this and not to Schindler’s money, that the Jews survived. Young Clara concealed her Jewishness and in order to survive, she had to hide for a long period in the attic of a peasant’s house. Moreover, until her journey back to Poland in the present-day, she also concealed her tragic life from her daughter who was born after the Holocaust and joins her on the trip to Poland and the secrets of the past. Clara also hears one secret for the first time, that her husband and Emilia had a son during the Holocaust, and that after the war the son was killed to avenge the murder of the farmer who had threatened to turn them in. The relationship of shame versus guilt is also expressed in the transformation, returning to Cairns’s assertion that a total separation between guilt and shame does not make sense. A situation, that according to the accepted distinction, is meant to cause feelings of guilt, is also likely to cause shame, and vice versa.

Matchmaker, matchmaker, look through your book Once I Was (The Matchmaker) (Avi Nesher, 2010) The last film in this cycle of the 2000s Holocaust-related feature films, Once I Was, is a classic initiation story of a boy relating the friendship between a Arik the teenager and a Holocaust survivor named Bride who runs a matchmaking agency in downtown Haifa, near the port. The film opens with Arik, as an adult, summoned to meet with an attorney who tells him that Bride has died and left him all his property; he also returns the notebook in which Arik wrote reports about the people he spied on for Bride. The notebook is an object of transition and at this point a flashback sequence opens with Arik’s memories as a teenager—once I was . . . The film’s two main characters are a native-born teenager, and his employer a matchmaker, a Holocaust survivor. The visible scar on Bride’s face signifies that he is something extraordinary. There are several extraordinary characters in the film, such as Arik’s father who is also a Holocaust survivor. One of Bride’s women friends is Sylvia, a dwarf who hopes that Bride will find her a husband. Bride’s guiding rule in the matchmaking business is that “in love there are no unusual people.” He fixes up each customer with “what he needs.” Arik’s task is

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to track the potential objects for matchmaking, and write down his findings in a notebook, after which Bride analyzes the information and comes up with a match. Arik resembels a private detective, though not in the service of a criminal, or a crime victim, but in the service of Bride the matchmaker. Of all the unusual people in the film, Bride is the most exceptional. Like the hero of a western,59 who turns up from “nowhere,” and single-handedly cleans up the town and frees its citizens from the bad guys. Bride also leaves the “township” where he arrived by chance and re-instituted law and order. Though he is a matchmaker, he goes his own way, and has no love object. Like in a western, the scar on his face is a reminder of the correction that he has made in the lives of people who needed his help. What is the correction task that Bride takes upon himself? As we’ll later see, by matchmaking and creating new families, Bride frees people of exception from their extraordinary status. As a matchmaker, he also arranges matches between the two sets of values of European Holocaust survivors, and of native-born Israelis. Bride’s office is located close to a bakery’s oven—the image of a fiery furnace: this is what Bride watches in his office while engaged in his matchmaking efforts. For “normative” Israelis, Holocaust survivors bear a sort of tag of shame. Matchmaking, by creating a sustainable relationship between those two disparate groups, makes it possible to erase the survivors’ shame. It is as if Bride “extinguishes” the shame and the burning generated by the weirdness of the Holocaust. Toward the end of the film, in a distinctive gesture, Arik’s native-born mother strokes his father’s head, seemingly wiping away the oddness of the survivors. Bride’s shame doesn’t derive from the odd appearance his scar has given him, but rather from his oddness as a Holocaust survivor. In a scene at the start of the film, Bride encounters a group of teenagers who make fun of him; he reacts stoically and asks them to refer to him people seeking a spouse. In a scene that refers to La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) Tamara, the group’s most popular girl, jumps into a pool with a fountain and calls Arik to join her. It is ostensibly a scene illustrating the spirit of youthful desire, but at another level we can discern a purification ceremony, a sort of religious purification ritual. One can then ask what has Arik, the native-born Israeli, got to do with purification? What “polluted” figure has tainted him? Perhaps Bride the survivor is marked by pollution because to survive the Holocaust he was in contact with corpses, physically or metaphorically. Bride is constantly purifying himself, and this is part of the framework of ideas implicit in his matchmaking work. It is his sense of being polluted that drives Bride to repeat the purification ritual he invented

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for himself—matchmaking. In Judaism, a wedding is a holy ceremony, and by making weddings Bride constantly satisfies his need for self-purification. In this case, unlike guilt, shame has a therapeutic aspect.60 Bride himself manages to configure an anomalous family. He and his girlfriend Clara appear to be a couple, but their relationship does not lead toward marriage. In a certain sense Arik behaves as if he was their son, and feels at home with them. Bride’s efforts to achieve normality fail, and at the ending of the film Bride remains isolated because the woman he loves is a Holocaust survivor: according to his line of thinking in matchmaking, their relationship can never come to fruition. The film describes the story of Arik growing up, and Bride’s realization is found in the link between the Holocaust and sexual seduction, resembling the link that appears in the film Burning Mooki. As an adolescent, Arik uses his home-made periscope to peep at his neighbor Tamara as she gets dressed. While working for Bride, he sleuths after a religious woman who is flirting with a secular young man, an act considered forbidden. The attitude to the Holocaust in the film acquires a pornographic aspect with its repeated references to the book “House of Dolls,” that portrays Jewish women forced to act as prostitutes for Nazi officers. The association between sexual seduction and the Holocaust is emphasized in the setting of Bride’s office next door to a cinema theater. When Arik works at tracking the love-life of candidates for a match people enter the theater near the matchmaker’s office to watch an Indian film called “The Storm of Love.” The Indian films shown in Israel were typified by the relationship between romantic love and matchmaking, and the founding of a family. Arik’s notebook is the focus of Arik’s maturation process and Bride’s self-realization. He uses it in the investigations he performs for Bride, seeking potential candidates, but it also functions as a sort of transitional object.61 In order to break away from the mother, the child adopts an object that helps him make the transition from dependence on an external factor like the mother, to a state of independence. Arik is in an interim state between childhood and adolescence, but once he’s an adult he no longer needs the notebook. His encounter with Bride’s matchmaking arrangements develops in him insights about the relationships between men and women. For Bride, however, the notebook is a societal transitional object: by creating matches, Bride transfers the objects of the match from anomalous to normal social status. But he will never complete that transition and he keeps the notebook as a transitional object—an admission ticket to his never achieved normality. At the end of the film, after Bride’s death, the notebook returns to Arik. In the scene where adult

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Arik receives the notebook, there is an admission that society has not matured to accept the otherness of the survivors. Now when Bride, the Don Quixote fighter, is dead, normality will not be attained either. The effort to shake off the burden of the Holocaust and the social tagging it casts on the survivors, is a Sisyphean effort that is inevitably frustrated. Arik’s notebook documents the huge effort to escape fixation in the trauma of the Holocaust by creating a format for normal life, an effort that fails. Ultimately Bride, with his notebook, remains the person who sends others across the bridge, while he himself looks from a distance at the promised land.

Rarer than the unicorn Completing the work of mourning Until the 1960s, the distinction between guilt and shame was almost nonexistent, and shame was perceived as a specific aspect of guilt feelings. At that period renewed interest began in the symptoms of shame, and today shame is a central field for researchers.62 An important theme in most of the films shame is associated with death in the Holocaust. But it is not those who perpetrated the crimes against humanity that are signified as the shameful origin (such as the “Nazi beast” in the film Made in Israel). A different statement is articulated in most of the films, that indicate a different shameful origin—the shame in belonging to the second generation, being the children of Holocaust survivors. In Walk on Water, for example, the protagonist takes upon himself the mission to kill a Nazi war-criminal. In The Debt, the protagonist, a female Mossad agent collaborates with her two man colleagues in tracking down a Nazi war-criminal and bringing him to trial in Israel. However the Nazi manages to escape and it is only decades later that she returns to complete her assignment. During the investigation and the pursuit, the young agent is not deterred by performing shameful acts. Claiming illness, she undresses and lies down on the Nazi gynecologist’s examination table, and he performs a gynecological examination. In the film Burning Mooki, the hero has sex with his mother and brings onto himself the shame of incest. The film Spring 1941 tells the story of a family in occupied Poland that finds refuge from the Germans in the home of a peasant woman. This film is told from the perspective of the survivor herself (though the film includes a representation of the second generation—her daughter, a physician). The need to conceal her Jewish identity is allied with a powerful

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sense of shame. In the film Once I Was, Holocaust survivors are portrayed as anomalous people who have assumed the inherent burden of their shameful otherness. The shame motif has a presence in all the films, but each one finds expression in a differing configuration. The memory of death in the Holocaust is accompanied by shame but also arouses anxiety deriving from fear that the Holocaust might return. Recollections of death during the Holocaust are charged with a sense of helplessness and lack of control which are known to be entailed in the powerful sense of shame. Defending oneself from those negative feelings of anxiety and shame is possible through the aestheticization of incidents of death. In the film Made in Israel, the death of the Nazi war-criminal is not seen onscreen, and the sound of the pistol shot with which he kills himself is heard from a distance. In the film Walk on Water, there are “living-dead” characters. In this film, the protagonist’s wife ends her life because of his assassinations: her memory haunts him and forces him to cease killing on behalf of the state. At the end of the film the protagonist is deterred from carrying out the assassination mission he was given, and lets his German friend do it instead. In The Debt, the protagonist completes her own assassination task but immediately afterwards, she herself dies a mythic death. In Burning Mooki, the teenager’s uncle is depicted as a hero because he killed a Nazi with his bare hands. In Once I Was there are no acts of killing, but the horror of death reverberates in both of them. The film Spring 1941 is exceptional in the corpus examined here, because the horrors of the Holocaust and death are fully present in it, without aesthetic or narrative ploys. The central section in the film is set in the Holocaust period. However the other films are “post-Holocaust movies” that do not represent events that occurred during the Holocaust. The films feature only traces of the past. In The Debt we see scenes of people who went through the Nazi doctor’s hands. In Made in Israel, and Walk on Water, there is a Nazi war-criminal, but the films pay only marginal attention to the past. Burning Mooki shows the life of Holocaust survivors in Israel but the events of the past are never shown, and the same is true for Once I Was. The difference between Spring 1941 and the other films finds expression in the optimistic closing scene. All the other films end tragically—in The Debt, and Made in Israel the protagonists die; in Walk on Water there is a disturbing ending in which the protagonist perpetuates the genes of the Nazi. The abjectness of the body that becomes a corpse is present in the awareness of Holocaust survivors and their children, intensifying their sense of shame. In the film Spring 1941 the reconstruction of incidents in the Holocaust moderates the

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sense of shame. The film’s protagonist, a cellist, is invited to appear at a concert in the country where in the past she almost lost her life. She is accompanied by her daughter, a physician, and her whole being projects “I’m here,” alive and well. In the final scene of Schindler’s List, the actors accompany the real characters on a pilgrimage to Schindler’s grave, and reiterate their existence in the film. Similarly, in Spring 1941, the protagonist is present in the final scene, where she plays on stage and sees among the audience in the concert-hall people from her past, the way they looked in reality during the time of the Holocaust. The other films unknowingly comply with the efforts of Claude Lanzmann63 who paved the way to moral criticism of Schindler’s List¸ because of the reconstruction in this film of the gas chambers. Since those films do not reconstruct events of the past they end on a pessimistic note. In this case the Holocaust memory is preserved as melancholia, a work of mourning that has never been completed and perhaps never will be. The protagonists continue to mourn and to sense their victimhood. In comparison, Spring 1941, offers a palpable description of the fate of Jews who hid from the Nazis in occupied Poland. It may be the only possible way to end a Holocaust feature film optimistically. Reconstructing the events of the Holocaust in a film enhances the completion of the mourning process, and ultimately makes healing a tangible possibility. As in many cases of PTSD, recovery requires the victims return to the scene of trauma. This urge will eventually liberate us from the Holocaust melancholy that dies away finally only with our own death. This resonates the words of Nikos Kazantzakis, author of “Freedom or Death,” who has ordered them to be carved on his tombstone: “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.”64

Notes 1 Jean Améry, Beyond Guilt and Atonement [in Hebrew], trans. Johnathan Nirad (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000 [1977]), 182. 2 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Chapter 1, www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm 3 “[. . .] near Ypres, 2,500 of the 3,000 men in the Hitler’s regiment were killed, wounded or missing. Hitler escaped without a scratch. [. . .] Corporal Hitler was a dispatch runner, taking messages back and forth from the command staff in the rear to the fighting units near the battlefield. During lulls in the fighting he would take out his watercolors and paint the landscapes of war. [. . .]. Hitler, unlike his fellow soldiers, never complained about bad food and the horrible conditions or

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Deeper than Oblivion talked about women, preferring to discuss art or history. He received a few letters but no packages from home and never asked for leave. His fellow soldiers regarded Hitler as too eager to please his superiors, but generally a likable loner notable for his luck in avoiding injury as well as his bravery. [. . . ]. In October 1918, he was temporarily blinded by a British chlorine gas attack near Ypres. [. . . ] He laid in a hospital bed consumed with dread amid a swirl of rumors of impending disaster (authors’ emphasis).” “The History Place: The Rise of Adolph Hitler,” accessed June 3, 2012, www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/warone.htm. The German historian Sebastian Haffner argues in his book “The Meaning of Hitler,” that Hitler’s lifelong unconscious aspiration was to cause Germany’s suicide, a drive that goes hand in hand with his condition as a WWI veteran, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A critic of the book (T. Bachman) writes: “If Germany couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be what Hitler wanted it to be, then it itself had to be totally annihilated.” Sebastian Haffner, The Meaning of Hitler [in Hebrew], trans. Haim Izak (Jerusalem: Shoken, 1979). The memory of the emblematic firestorm that in World War II raged for days and nights in great cities like London, Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo, and eventually the lightning fire in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—suddenly freezes. And then, as at the end of the film Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985), the events of the past unfold from present to past, like a film screened backwards. See Nurith Gertz, Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004). “Address the widespread ambivalence and guilt feeling in Israel about the Holocaust victims,. Judd Ne’eman, “The Tragic Sense of Zionism: Shadow Cinema and the Holocaust,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 22–36. Dina Porat, An Entangled Leadership: The Yishuv and the Holocaust, 1942–1945 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1987); S. B. Beit-Zvi, Post-Ugandan Zionism in the Holocaust Crisis, 1939–1940 [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Bronfman, 1977). “However, the surfacing of guilt in the Shadow Cinema, as well as the mythic-historical analogies created in these films, points to an alternative way of reading this disturbing predicament.” Neeman, “The Tragic Sense,” 34. Ibid., 35. “. . . now survivor guilt has been dropped as one of the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, shame has come to take its place as the emotion that most defines the traumatic state. This has meant recasting the theory of identification with the aggressor into a hypothesis that links trauma to shame.” Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 127. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 119.

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13 Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honor and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 15. 14 Ibid., 16. 15 Ibid., 17. 16 Ibid., 18. 17 Ibid., 20. 18 Ibid., 21. 19 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 130. 20 John Carroll, Guilt: The Grey Eminence behind Character, History and Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 29. 21 We would like to thank Raz Yosef, the editor, for referring us to Ruth Leys’s book From Guilt to Shame, and suggesting to us to focus on this central question in the discussion of the films made in the 2000s. 22 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 24. 23 See Noujain Elie Georges, “History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault’s Approach to History” in Contemporary French Philosophy, ed. A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987): “Yet it may be argued that in describing what is thought to be good as descending from an ignoble ancestry, as having a pudenda origo, the descriptive language of genealogy enables itself to level criticism and sound warnings without having to step back from the business of writing history in order to issue moral condemnation or praise” (170). 24 See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872). 25 “The intimacy that one experiences before one’s own unknown murderer is the most extreme intimacy, an intimacy that can as such provoke shame” (Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [New York: Zone Books, 1999], 120). 26 Ibid., 104. 27 Ibid. 28 See Menachem Vazelman, Sign of Cain: On the Zionist Movement and the Jewish Agency’s Omissions during the Holocaust, 1939–1945 [in Hebrew], ed. Menachem Gerlik (Tel Aviv, [1988?]). 29 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 126. 30 Ibid., 127. 31 Boaz Hagin, “Male Weeping as Performative: The Crying Mossad Assassin in Walk on Water,” Camera Obscura 68, 23, no. 2 (2008): 121. 32 Raz Yosef, “Phantasmatic Losses: National Traumas, Masculinity, and the Primal Fantasy in Walk on Water,” in The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2011), 126.

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33 Ibid., 131. 34 Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Bible (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1956), 167. 35 Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Seven Years of Conversations Over the Weekly Torah Portion 1976–1982 [in Hebrew], ed. Ben Zion Mishael Nuriel (Jerusalem: Keter, 2000), 104. 36 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History—The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), 51–92. 37 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 107. 38 Ibid., 105. 39 Ibid., 106. 40 Erich Neumann, Art and the Creative Unconscious: Four Essays, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 9. 41 Erich Neumann, The Fear of the Feminine and Other Essays on Feminine Psychology, trans. Boris Matthews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 77. 42 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 125. 43 Rivka Shechter, Auschwitz, Faust-Kingdom [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Now, 1986), 205–7. 44 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 107. 45 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17. 46 Lyrics by Mordecai Gebirtig, 1938. “Music of the Holocaust: Highlights from the Collection,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed June 3, 2012, www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/music/detail.php?content=burning 47 “Whereas the active phallic part of urethral eroticism in boys is soon replaced by normal genitality [. . . .] passive male urethral eroticism may [. . .] sometimes be combined with rather sadistic fantasies, as the analysis of cases of severe ejaculatio praecox shows. [. . .] failures in urethral cleanliness are usually punished by putting the child to shame—much more so than failures in rectal cleanliness. It is not easy to say whence the deep connection between urethral eroticism and shame comes; [. . .] so shame is the specific force directed against urethral-erotic temptations” (authors’ emphasis). Otto Fenichel, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972 [1945]), 69. 48 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 38. 49 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 94. 50 Ibid., 104. 51 Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 132. 52 The framing narrative of Mooki the adult who lives with his Norwegian wife and their son in Norway brings to mind Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling, a Norwegian politician, who on April 9, 1940, with the German invasion of Norway in progress seized power in a Nazi-backed coup d’état. From 1942 to 1945 he served as Minister-President, working with the occupying forces. The collaborationist

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57 58 59 60 61

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government participated—wittingly or unwittingly—in Germany’s Final Solution. This aspect of Mooki’s story is in line with his self degradation. Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 126. Ibid. Ibid., 125. “And Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of such as dwell in tents and have cattle. And his brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all such as handle the harp and pipe.” Gen. 4. 20–21. “And Zillah, she also bore Tubal-cain, the forger of every cutting instrument of brass and iron; and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah.” Genesis 4. 22. Ne’eman, “The Metallurgic War Machine,” 47–76. See Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 124. In his introduction to Playing and Reality, Winnicott wrote that “what I am referring to . . . is not so much the object used as the use of the object.” Donald Woods Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), xii. The term transitional object was coined in 1951 by Winnicott as a designation for any material object (typically something soft—a piece of cloth, say, or part of a plush toy) to which an infant attributes a special value and by means of which the child is able to make the necessary shift from the earliest oral relationship with the mother to genuine object-relationships (Alainde Mijolla, ed., International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis [Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005], s.v. “Transitional Object”). Leys, From Guilt to Shame, 123. Claude Lanzman, “Holocauste, Representation Impossible,” Le Monde, Arts and Spectacles 46, no. 4 (1994). “Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δε φοβάμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λεύτερος” (I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free). “Nikos Kazantzakis,” Wikipedia, accessed June 3, 2012, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Améry, Jean. Beyond Guilt and Atonement [in Hebrew]. Translated by Johnathan Nirad. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000 [1977]. Beit-Zvi, S. B. Post-Ugandan Zionism in the Holocaust Crisis, 1939–1940 [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Bronfman, 1977.

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Cairens, Douglas L. Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honor and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Carroll, John. Guilt: The Grey Eminence behind Character, History and Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray, 1872. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York: Pantheon Books, 1954. Fenichel, Otto. The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1972 [1945]. Georges, Noujain Elie. “History as Genealogy: An Exploration of Foucault’s Approach to History,” in Contemporary French Philosophy, edited by A. Phillips Griffiths, 157–74. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Gertz, Nurith. Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004. Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Bible. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1956. Haffner Sebastian. The Meaning of Hitler [in Hebrew]. Translated by Haim Izak. Jerusalem: Shoken, 1979. Hagin, Boaz. “Male Weeping as Performative: The Crying Mossad Assassin in Walk on Water.” Camera Obscura 68, 23, no. 2 (2008): 103–39. “The History Place: The Rise of Adolph Hitler,” accessed June 3, 2012. www.historyplace. com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/warone.htm Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lanzman Claude. “Holocauste, Representation Impossible.” Le Monde, Arts and Spectacles 46, no. 4 (1994): 159–62. Leibowitz, Yeshayahu. Seven Years of Conversations over the Weekly Torah Portion 1976–1982 [in Hebrew]. Edited by Ben Zion Mishael Nuriel. Jerusalem: Keter, 2000. Leys, Ruth. From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Mijolla, Alainde, ed. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005. Ne’eman, Judd. “The Metallurgic War Machine in Schindler’s List.” Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew] 18 (Spring 2001): 47–76. —. “The Tragic Sense of Zionism: Shadow Cinema and the Holocaust”. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 22–36. Neumann, Erich. Art and the Creative Unconscious: Four Essays. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. —. The Fear of the Feminine and Other Essays on Feminine Psychology. Translated by Boris Matthews. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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Porat, Dina. An Entangled Leadership: The Yishuv and the Holocaust, 1942–1945 [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1987. Shechter, Rivka. Auschwitz, Faust-Kingdom [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Now, 1986. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Music of the Holocaust: Highlights from the Collection,” accessed June 3, 2012. www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/online/ music/detail.php?content=burning Vazelman, Menachem. Sign of Cain: On the Zionist Movement and the Jewish Agency’s Omissions During the Holocaust, 1939–1945 [in Hebrew]. Edited by Menachem Gerlik. Tel Aviv [1988?]. Wikipedia. “Nikos Kazantzakis,” accessed June 3, 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Nikos_Kazantzakis. Winnicott, Donald Woods. Playing and Reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Wright, Will. Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Yosef, Raz. “Phantasmatic Losses: National Traumas, Masculinity, and the Primal Fantasy in Walk on Water.” In The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema, 121–35. New York: Routledge, 2011.

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Passages, Wars, and Encounters with Death: The Desert as a Site of Memory in Israeli Film Yael Zerubavel

The present essay explores the intersection between memory and space at a moment of crisis when facing an imminent threat of death. More specifically, it examines the cinematic representations of such critical moments as experienced in the Israeli desert through the discussion of five films made between the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s and the transformations of this theme during these three decades. Both memory and space are approached here as cultural categories that are to be understood within the broader historical context of the sociopolitical reality at the time and through the examination of how they interact and inform each other. Thus, in addressing the memory-space juncture, this study is inspired by Maurice Halbwachs’ seminal work on collective memory and its later refinements, considering memory as an organic part of the cultural fabric of the society that is being reshaped in response to the present but also in response to the pressure of the historical records.1 As I have shown elsewhere, the relatively recent Israeli memory has been anchored in centuries-old Jewish memory but has displayed a selective approach to the Jewish past in fitting with its nationalist paradigm. This essay addresses critical moments in the history of Israeli society that articulate the broad formula of death and rebirth which is at the core of the Zionist vision of national revival but its roots go back to Jewish memory. Memory tends to be particularly productive and elaborate around events dealing with crises and transitions. In regular times, the reshaping of memory is often done through subtle transformations of nuances and shades, but during periods of major historical and political developments, significant changes may

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be introduced into the understanding of the past. Unlike the suppression of memory in response to individual traumatic experiences, traumas experienced at the collective level are incorporated into the group’s master commemorative narrative in some fashion even though they require a longer process to come to terms with this history and its impact. The evolving place of the Holocaust in Israeli master commemorative narrative since the 1950s provides a prime example of this process.2 This essay approaches the memory-space juncture through the cultural lens, drawing on Yi-Fu Tuan’s conceptual distinction between “space” and “place.” The discussion thus relates to the desert as a “symbolic landscape” the meaning of which is culturally constructed and may be transformed overtime.3 Having evolved since biblical times, the memory of the desert offers a rich interpretive context to examine its role as a liminal space of transitions and passages. Zionist ideology and the Hebrew culture drew heavily on Jewish memory of the desert in the biblical narrative but highlighted national over religious themes. The complex interweaving of mythical memories and the recent Israeli past in the interpretation of dramatic moments of death or near-death in the desert thus offers a particularly poignant focus for this study. Given the communicative dimension of film, this medium can serve to articulate and reinforce a predominant memory of the past or offer a subversive interpretation that may destabilize and reshape public memory.4 The desert has often served as a site of memory associated with symbolic passages and traumatic encounters with death which is deeply rooted in the biblical narrative of the Exodus that highlighted its mythical role as a liminal space. It was where the Israelites experienced their transformation from a society of slaves to a free people, and this transition involved a real and symbolic process of a collective death and rebirth: Those who came out of Egypt and were deemed constrained by their slave mentality were destined to die, while a new generation of freeborn was chosen to enter the Promised Land and thereby mark the opening of a new era. The ancient Exodus narrative offered a mythical paradigm that helped shape the Zionist master commemorative narrative. Zionism’s vision of ending Jewish life in exile by the return to the Land of Israel created a modern version of the Exodus that featured the modern revival of the ancient nation and introduced a new national age to Jewish history.5 The desert also emerged in the Hebrew culture of the early twentieth century as a cultural category that articulated the Zionist pioneers’ cultural memory and their views of the country in which they settled. Within the social production of

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the Zionist space during the prestate period, “desert” did not present a coherent physical landscape that corresponds to its geographical definition but rather a symbolic landscape that derives its meaning within a broader cultural semantics. In Henri Lefebvre’s terms, it was not space as perceived but rather space as conceived.6 “Desert” was thus used as a generalized reference to the space that the Zionist immigrants encountered and which they characterized by its grim contrast to the imagined biblical “land of milk and honey” and the similarly idealized images of the newly constructed Jewish settlements. In this framework, “desert” implied an empty, undifferentiated, and natural space whereas the Jewish settlements represented the familiar, safe, and historicized place, collectively known as the Settlement (Yishuv).7 The desert was the product of the long period of Jewish Exile, while the Settlement embodied the achievement of the Zionist national revival. Desert signified the space outside the Zionist Settlement that threatened the Settlement’s survival, but as a barren and unmarked territory it also carried the potential to be transformed into “place.” Within the Zionist Settlement ethos, then, the desert and the Settlement emerged as complementary categories held by their oppositional relations. The present discussion of cinematic representations of the desert as a site of memory, passages, and encounters with death begins with the film The Hope (Be’ein moledet, 1956), directed by Nuri Habib. In this film, the desert serves in its biblical role as a liminal space separating the exiled from their ancient homeland. Focusing on the portrayal of Yemenite Jews’ immigration to Palestine, the film presents their modern Exodus within both the traditional-religious and the contemporary-national mnemonic frameworks. As the frontier of the Zionist settlement moved south in the 1940s, the desert emerged as a key site of frequent military confrontations and its association with death and rebirth became an important theme in the national heroic narratives of that period. The film Pillar of Fire (Amud ha’esh, 1959), directed by Larry Frisch, addresses this role of the desert during the critical period of Israel’s War of Independence. In the post-independence period, the desert frontier was not only a buffer from the hostile environment surrounding the state; it also opened up the possibility of a reverse passage from the home territory into the enemy’s land. Micha Shagrir’s Scouting Patrol (Sayarim, 1967) and Raphael Nussbaum’s Blazing Sands (Holot lohatim, 1960) present two kinds of “reverse passages” that involve death in the desert terrain. The discussion of these films allows us to examine the significance of this transformed route and the place of the desert in it and compare their representations of these changes. The last section of this essay

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discusses Rafi Bukai’s film, Avanti Popolo (1986) and its innovative representation of the meaning of the desert as a site of wars, passages, and encounters with death. The film introduces a new perspective that requires the viewers to expand beyond group memory and engage in a multifaceted interpretation of the relation between the settlement and the desert. Moreover, this work suggests the possibility to view the desert not only as a site of confrontation and death but also as a potential meeting place, even if limited by the constraints of a transitional phase. The discussion of this film points out the development of Israeli cinema in new and bold ways to become a cutting-edge cultural form that encourages Israelis to reevaluate both critically and creatively the interplay between past and future, “us” and “them.”

A modern exodus: From exile to the homeland A black-and-white image of a barren tree is featured on the screen at the opening of the film The Hope. Along with its Hebrew title, Be’ein Moledet (literally, “without a homeland”), this image foregrounds a state of lack which Zionist memory associates with Jewish life in exile.8 The English narration defines the film’s point of departure in broad historical terms: “Our story happened many times in many places.” This opening clearly states the intent to present this film as a mnemonic work that addresses the paradigmatic state of Jewish exilic experience and its Zionist orientation. Only then does the narrator introduce the plot in its historical context: Yemen in 1926. The film features Naomi, a Jewish woman whom the Yemenites took away from the Jewish community as an orphaned child and raised as a Muslim. This first episode introduces the heroine, a beautiful young singer performing in a coffee house that is frequented by Yemeni men. As she descends the stairs dressed in a hot pink dress and adorned with jewelry and enters a room filled with men smoking and chatting, this movement symbolically marks her social decline. Although she carries herself with dignity, her vulnerable position becomes apparent toward the end of a lengthy performance when an insulting remark humiliates her in public. When she leaves the confines of the Muslim space, a chance meeting with a Jewish shepherd whom she knew as a child further reveals her ambiguous Jewish/Muslim identity. When the young man calls her Naomi, she calls herself Na’ama, using her Arabic name. When he questions her about her performance

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“for them,” she justifies it by her love for music and need to provide for herself. Undeterred by her responses, the young Jew gives Naomi an essentialist view of her identity: “You were born a Jew and you will remain a Jew . . . they have not replaced your blood.” Naomi’s reply that she does not wish to belong to “rootless people who lack a homeland” resorts to a Zionist theme that seems out of place within the immediate dialogue, yet it echoes the film’s Hebrew title and foreshadows the heroine’s future transformation. This comment also serves as a symbolic link to the following scene featuring the precarious state of the Jews in her town. Moving from the individual to the collective, the next scene displays the persecution of Jews as Muslim men harass them on the street, killing a Jewish man in front of his young son and vandalizing the synagogue. When that boy, now an orphan, is brought to Naomi, she sees in him a mirror-image of herself as a child. Her concern for his future drives her to reassess her own insecure state among the Muslims and motivates her to save him from a similar fate. “Don’t be afraid, my child,” she comforts the scared child. “I will take you away from this damned country. I was stupid all of these years. I thought I would be able to close my ears to my people’s loud cries, to live here in peace and quiet. But they would always remind me who I am [. . .] You will not live here. You will live as a free and proud Jew . . .” Having learned from her childhood acquaintance about the arrival of a Zionist emissary who plans to smuggle Jews out of Yemen and bring them to the Land of Israel, she decides to join the first group and take the boy with her. When a couple of men oppose her request to join them because of her dubious status, she accuses the Jewish community for failing to protect her as a child and insists on her right to be part of the group and on the moral obligation to save the boy. Once they join the small group, she and the young boy stand out among the men not only due to their gender or age differences but also because as orphans they embody Jewish victimhood in exile. The long shot from the back featuring the group walking away through an arch into the open landscape highlights the theme of departure from their home in Yemen toward their future national home in Palestine. From this point on, the plot focuses on the group’s passage through a forbidding desert landscape en route to the Promised Land, presenting a modern reenactment of the biblical Exodus. The long and dangerous trekking in the desert is emotionally and physically taxing and numerous trials test the travelers’ ideological commitment, physical endurance, and resourcefulness. Indeed, not everyone survives these trials, and deaths occur due to both the

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brutality of nature and human weaknesses. Thus, a snake bite kills one young man, while two other despairing men leave the group, wishing to find their way back to Yemen. Like the biblical detractors who long for “the meat pot” they left behind in Egypt, the two men who lose their faith in the Zionist guide and are lured back by materialistic concerns are destined to die in the desert, unwilling to move forward toward a new future and unable to survive on their own. The film features their death but does not dwell on the survivors’ response to their defection, keeping its focus on the others’ determination to move forward against all odds. Within the Exodus paradigm, death is an integral part of the transitory phase and the immediate struggle for survival and the broader redemptive framework minimize its impact. The passage through the desert transforms the survivors into a committed Zionist group entitled to earn entry to the Promised Land. Their last trial occurs near the border at the end of their long and difficult trek, when Yemenite border guards discover them. In a scene reminiscent of a western film, the guards threaten to shoot the escapees from the mountain tops but the armed Zionist youths who have been waiting for the escapees move first, kill them, and rescue the Jews. In accordance with the Israeli secular national view of the 1950s, the film presents the success of the modern Exodus as a result of human action, not divine intervention.9 The film ends as the boat sails away in the direction of Palestine but before the Yemenite Jews reach their destination, thereby reinforcing the emphasis on the passage through the desert as the critical part of their journey.10 Here too a long shot view of the distancing boat taken from the perspective of the shore highlights the theme of departure from exile. The movement forward into the horizon underscores the achievement of freedom and symbolizes an open future. Standing on the mountain, the Zionist emissary watches them leave before turning back to Yemen to continue his rescue mission. Like Moses, he remains behind, yet unlike the ancient leader, the modern leader chooses to stay behind out of his free will and commitment to the Zionist vision. Symbolically, Naomi’s song based on the biblical prophecy of returning to Zion dominates the sound track at the conclusion of the film. Nuri Habib, an Iraqi Jew and a recent immigrant, had extensive experience in filmmaking as a photographer before his arrival in Israel. The Hope, the first film he directed, was credited as the first full-feature in color produced in Israel and made entirely by Israelis. In the 1950s, the film’s focus on Yemenite Jews as the fulfillers of the modern Exodus paradigm and the choice of a Yemenite Israeli singer, Shoshana Damari,11 for the lead role as Naomi introduced a new facet

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to the national commemorative narrative of the early Zionist immigrations to Palestine which largely focused on European Jews. The film addresses the misery of the Jewish existence in exile and the trials and tribulations of the passage out as it follows the Exodus paradigm; but it stops short of including the third phase of that journey that focuses on the arrival and the integration into the new society. It is quite possible that the predominant framework of the Exodus paradigm presumes the successful completion of the journey and the English title of the film, The Hope, reinforces this optimistic interpretation. At the time the film was made, this construction may have also been determined by the political subtext that shaped the film’s message. In the midst of the massive immigration to Israel in the 1950s, immigrants from the Middle East suffered from major social and economic hardships and marginalization and were seen as refugees more than committed Zionists. This view thus suggested a sharp contrast between them and those who had arrived during the prestate era and subscribed to its pioneering ethos.12 Habib’s presentation of an early Yemenite Jewish immigration highlights Middle Eastern Jews’ historical contribution to Zionist history and the Israeli national narrative, presenting them on equal footing with the European Zionist immigrants who left their countries of origin voluntarily prior to the foundation of the state. Given the history of the Yemenite Jews’ reception by the Ashkenazi Zionist pioneers,13 this film’s message was better served by avoiding the portrayal of their arrival to Palestine and their experiences there. The emphasis on the first and second parts of the Exodus paradigm thus enhanced the shared Jewish themes of suffering and victimhood in exile and the heroic persistence on the way to the Land of Israel, leaving out the final and more problematic part of this immigration narrative. This presentation of the Yemenite Jewish exodus was all the more important in the post-Holocaust years, when the formula of death and rebirth was applied primarily to European Jewry. Furthermore, the prominent role of the Exodus narrative, the Middle Eastern setting, and the desert landscape within the film enhanced Middle Eastern Jews’ cultural capital as having closer affinity with the Bible and their claim for a more central place in Jewish and Israeli memories. Naomi’s song of the biblical prophecy of return to Zion further links the film’s narrative with the immigrants’ distinct combination of Zionist and religious values.14 Although the first screening of The Hope was marked by the attendance of prominent Israeli officials and the diplomatic corps,15 the reception of the film was lukewarm at best. Its failure may be ascribed to its conformity to Zionist

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rhetoric and views which had been typical of the earlier “propaganda films” but by the time the film was made were already in decline in Israel. It is also possible that the failure to attract Israeli audiences reflects veteran Israelis’ lack of interest in Middle Eastern Jews and exilic cultures at that period.16 Four years later, the Hollywood production of Exodus, based on Leon Uris’s novel and directed by Otto Preminger, presented a European-centered version of the Exodus paradigm and enjoyed great success not only abroad but also in Israel. The more polished and well-funded American film substituted Middle Eastern Jews by Holocaust survivors, the desert by the sea, and Egyptians by British and Arabs, and its cast featured well-known stars. Preminger’s representation of Holocaust survivors’ trials on the way to Israel and the heroic representation of Israeli society in this film affirmed Israelis’ values and Zionist memory and ensured its success.17

Death on the desert frontier During the 1940s, new Jewish outposts were established in the Negev desert to advance the dual goal of settlement and defense in support of the Jewish demand to include this region within the territory of a future Jewish state. When the War of Independence broke out, these desert settlements became Israel’s first line of defense against advancing Egyptian forces. The film Pillar of Fire, 1959, directed by the young Zionist American director, Larry Frisch, revolves around a small outpost in the Negev and its defense during that time. The film was shot in Revivim, a kibbutz that developed from one of these early outposts.18 Pillar of Fire opens with shots of the vast desert landscape before the camera zeroes in on a small Jewish outpost and on enemy tanks moving toward it in the distance. The opening accentuates the contrast between the tiny outpost and the enormity of the desert that surrounds it and foregrounds key themes in the film that are central to Israeli national memory: The desert-settlement opposition, a state of besiegement, and a fight of a few against many.19 An unexpected shelling of the outpost leaves one person dead and several others wounded. The Jewish defenders realize that their situation is even more acute when they learn that the military headquarter in Beer Sheva, a small town at the center of the Negev, cannot provide any assistance. “Nobody can help us . . . we are on our own,” one of them grimly notes. The single female in this group says: “It’s not fair, they are destroying everything. We worked so hard . . . There was nothing here when we came—just sand and stones. Now they bring it all back again.” The

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Egyptians thus collude with destructive desert forces in the efforts to destroy the settlement and turn it back into a desert.20 When the Israeli commander sends out a few of his men to scout the whereabouts of the tanks in order to warn the military headquarter about their movements, four out of six people including the commander get killed. The remaining two—the female nurse and a wounded American volunteer—manage to get back alive and deliver that critical warning. The plot in this film is typical of the Zionist narratives of settlement and defense and the particular story of the outpost may be seen as an allegory for the state and its struggle for survival in 1948 as constructed within Jewish-Israeli memory. The defenders’ various backgrounds and ages, including an older Israeli commander, Holocaust survivors, a young American Jewish volunteer, and a young Sabra nurse, represent the diversity of Israeli society. In spite of their differences in age, gender, and life experiences, and their extreme isolation in the desert, they are determined to fight the enemy in the frontier to fulfill David Ben-Gurion’s dictum: “In any place in the country, we need to defend existing settlements, whereas in the Negev, we have to defend the desert, the ‘non-settlement’.”21 Drawing on the biblical “pillar of fire” that led the Israelites during their wanderings in the desert (Exod. 13. 21–22), the title of the film alludes to the defenders’ role of protecting their country and guarantee its future.22 The film further highlights the theme of patriotic sacrifice, central to the 1948 lore, in a song entitled “He Was Gray,” performed by the lead actress-singer Nehama Handel. At the same time, the budding romance between the American Jewish volunteer and the Sabra nurse represents the future and validates the formula of death and rebirth. The deliberate efforts by the non-Israeli director to present Israel’s heroic face to the outside world and his conformity to the Zionist script come at the expense of the narrative’s complexity and nuance. One of the strategies employed here, as in other Israeli or Hollywood films of that period (such as Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, Exodus, and Cast a Giant Shadow) is to introduce non-Israeli characters who first doubt the Zionist cause go through a “conversion” into ardent Zionists who contribute to the Jewish national struggle. Furthermore, in the tradition of Israeli national-heroic films, Pillar of Fire focuses on male figures, casting the single woman to an auxiliary role. This pattern is later broken when men are killed and the nurse becomes actively engaged in the military action, and ultimately saves herself and her wounded lover. The inclusion of a female character thus opens room for the additional melodrama of a love affair during wartime. The film

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offers a brief romantic interlude when the American volunteer and the Sabra nurse get away to bring water from a well and this short diversion from the war scenes allows them to confess their love for each other. This scene also gives the viewer a glimpse of the romantic side of the desert, underscored by the musical score and Orientalist imagery. The Holocaust plays a critical role in the 1950s construction of death and rebirth, yet Pillar of Fire presents a somewhat more complex picture of the Holocaust survivors who join the Jewish defenders soon after they arrive in Israel. Under the stress of the shelling of the outpost, one of the Holocaust survivors refuses to go into the shelter and later risks his life as he positions himself in the line of fire during combat. Eventually he throws himself with grenades to stop an advancing Egyptian tank, and is killed in this process. Although such death can be easily portrayed as a heroic self-sacrifice, the film implies that survivor guilt led to his death. Witnessing the fire and smoke coming out of the burning tank and consuming his friend evokes the memory of smoking chimneys and death scenes for another Holocaust survivor and retraumatizes him. These post-traumatic responses suggest that the trauma of the Holocaust and the gas chambers undermines the conventional portrayal of the Zionist formula of death and rebirth. With this exception, however, the heroic and melodramatic orientation of the film tends to present Israeli life in idealized and simplified terms. The film reinforces the official Israeli memory of the 1948 war that valorizes the Israeli youth and affirms the link between the Holocaust and the founding of Israel by giving Holocaust survivors an important, if not uniform, role in defending the newly established Jewish state. The film interweaves into the plot the themes of love, sacrifice, trauma, and death, but these themes appear secondary to the ideological thrust of presenting the heroic face of Israel at the moment of its birth.

Border-crossings and reverse passages The porous character of Israel’s southern and eastern borders that separated it from its Arab neighbors became a major issue during the 1950s. The open landscape of the desert subverted the security of establishing political borders. Israel emphasized the grave security risks posed by the “infiltrators,” the Palestinian fedayeen, who endangered the frontier settlements and undermined Israel’s sovereignty over its desert region. But the open desert terrain also made

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it possible for Israeli commando soldiers to move across the border to carry out covert operations of “military reprisals” on enemy territory. Crossing the desert landscape into the enemy’s land emerged as a limited, yet visible trend in Israel during the first post-independence decade. Young Israelis, typically around the age of military service, took the risk of crossing the border and moving about in enemy territory before making it back home. Such clandestine, dare-devil excursions by youth who had been raised by the heroic myths of the prestate period were committed without parental knowledge and in defiance of official prohibitions. Petra, the mysterious red-rock Nabbatean city located in Jordan, emerged as the most popular destination of these forbidden journeys. With a few exceptions, most of those who tried this route did not make it back home.23 Alarmed by the dangerous fad, the government prohibited the broadcasting of the song “The Red Rock” that describes Petra’s mystique and its allure for Israeli youth.24 In spite of the obvious differences between the IDF’s military reprisals across the border and such individual illegal adventures, the two forms of border-crossing shared the heroic ethos of the prestate period and its glorification of clandestine operations that require daring and determination in defiance of the law. The desert, which represented the “counter-place,” clearly fit that spirit. Both types of excursions also shared the tripartite structure of rites of passage where the desert serves as the transitional phase involving transformative experiences. In a significant departure from the linear route from exile to the homeland that the Exodus model presents, this later transformation suggests a circular route that both begins and ends at the home territory. The revised route clearly reflects the post-independence reality in which the “home” territory has been established. This change enhanced the significance of the transitional phase away from home, yet it introduced greater ambiguity about the journey’s legitimacy and objectives. The two films discussed below respectively represent the military and adventurous excursions across the border in the desert terrain. Scouting Patrol, directed by Micha Shagrir (1967) addresses Israel’s military reprisal against the fedayeens in the 1950s. Military scouts who patrol an unpaved road discover infiltrators’ tracks and neutralize the mines that they hid in the sand. Soon after their safe return to the base, they receive an order to go across the border to an Arab town where a fedayeen’s commander lives and bring him back alive to Israeli territory. This introductory scene sets the stage for the “reverse journey” from the home territory into the enemy’s land through trekking in the desert, and the rest of the film follows this military operation. The

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sweeping views of the desert landscape at the opening of the film foreshadow the central role of the desert in this film plot, and Israeli critics noted the remarkable artistic quality and impact of this desert photography.25 The film follows four commandos trekking in the desert at night and entering a sleepy Arab town. Once there, they surprise the unsuspecting Arab commander at his home and take him with them. The mission is complicated when a middle-aged Arab man who entered the commander’s house while they were there is set free by one of the reserve duty commandos and alerts others to the Israeli operation. The Israeli commandos now must choose a longer and more difficult track in the desert to evade those who chase them. The scenes depicting their escape through hidden tracks and under the cover of rocks and the shooting exchanges in which they engage borrow heavily from the western film. During this retreat, the Israelis display their resourcefulness and daring as well as their ability to work well as a team under the enemy’s fire. Reassured that the danger has been averted the Israelis lower their guard, and the Arab captive seizes the opportunity to get hold of a gun and attempts to escape when his captors are asleep. The reserve soldier who earlier freed the man in town wakes up, sees him escaping and warns him to drop his gun, but the Arab kills him as the others wake up from that confrontation. Having overcome the Arab, the rest of the group returns to their base with their captive, thus fulfilling their mission. Scouting Patrol conforms to the model of the national-heroic Israeli film in focusing on a group of men involved in carrying out a challenging military mission; but it departs from this genre in some significant ways.26 Along with displaying the combat soldiers’ considerable abilities, the film reveals their vulnerabilities and weaknesses. The once legendary hero who is now on reserve duty confesses that “it is not that great to be thirty-year-old and live with stories of the past.” The film also discloses the inevitable tensions between him and a younger career-officer who was his trainee and is now in charge of the mission. The most significant departure from the national-heroic mold is the portrayal of the Israeli soldier’s death as an outcome of the soldiers’ careless behavior. Although death in the course of military action can be easily framed as a sacrifice for the country, the film ultimately depicts it as avoidable. Scouting Patrol thus demonstrates the complexity of human behavior in a war situation without romanticizing or demonizing its characters, including the captive commander. In presenting him as a resourceful man who can present a real challenge to the Israelis, the film avoids the cartoonish representation of

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Arab soldiers typical of earlier Israeli films. In another respect, however, the film continues the Israeli convention of casting Middle Eastern Jews in the role of Arabs.27 Yet in clear contrast to the non-sentimental approach of the script so far, the lyrics of the lead song about a fallen soldier echo the popular theme of “the living dead” in Israeli memorial culture that romanticizes patriotic sacrifice by obscuring the finality of death.28 Significantly, the dead hero’s image is featured on the screen along with the commandos returning to the base. The film also fails to critically explore the impact of the soldier’s death on his comrades at a time when other Israeli films began to approach this subject more directly.29 Blazing Sands, directed by Raphael Nussbaum (1960), presents a melodramatic story inspired by the 1950s fad of crossing the border to Jordan in order to reach Petra. The film opens with an incident involving Israeli youth who had gone to an imaginary ancient desert city named Sitra, a thinly disguised reference to Petra, and were discovered there. Only one of them managed to make it back to Israel, though he is critically wounded, and dies in the hospital. Before his death, however, he tells a friend that the man she loves remained hiding and in a critical condition in a burial cave in Sitra where he discovered ancient Hebrew scrolls. The female friend who becomes the lead character in the film recruits four other Israeli men to join her on a secret rescue mission to Jordan. Setting on their way, the group has to evade the Israeli police investigating the case and, once they cross the border, both the Bedouins and the enemy authorities. Riding camels and donkeys disguised as Bedouins, the five proceed in the desert territory, and manage to locate the wounded friend and the scrolls. At this point, however, greed and pursuit of personal interests pull the group apart. One of the men who escapes with both the scrolls and the medical supplies is killed by the Bedouins, and the wounded friend dies on the way back without the medical help he needs. Hostile encounters end with the deaths of the other two men and wound the heroine. The only person saved is the scientist who reaches the border carrying the wounded heroin in his arms as the wind blows the scroll pages away. The amateurish mission thus fails to rescue either the wounded man or the scrolls and brings about additional unnecessary deaths in the desert. Blazing Sands suffers from shallow dialogues and two-dimensional characters, mediocre acting, and an obvious attempt to emulate the Hollywood western tradition. Its melodramatic orientation becomes excessive, if not incredible, in some scenes, such as the heroine’s dance for her dying lover in the desert landscape, while a heroic Israeli desert song provides the film score. In spite of these weaknesses, both Blazing Sands and some of the critical response to it

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reveal an important facet of the development of the theme of passage and death in the desert in Israeli films and underscore the tension between official and popular memory.30 Whereas Scouting Patrol represents a military mission that is carried in the name of national security and consists of men only, Blazing Sands revolves around the pursuit of love, personal loyalty, scientific interest, and greed. The disapproval of these dangerous excursions for personal pursuits is articulated by the police and the hospital doctor who represent adult authorities as they note that “these youths are playing with death as if it were some sort of a national sport.” The police inspector reiterates this position when talking to the heroine: “Your friends think that they are heroes, but they put the entire country at risk.” The young woman does not heed these warnings and pursues her plans. Unlike earlier gender representations, however, the film empowers the only female character with the lead role as the organizer of the excursion and allows her to become an active participant in a shooting exchange with the Bedouins. At the same time, it conforms to gender stereotypes by attributing her motivation to love, a conventionally feminized domain, and by portraying her as a manipulative person who uses her sex appeal to get her way with men. At the official level, the national-military and the individual-adventurous border-crossings of the 1950s offer significant differences in their meanings: whereas the former was glorified as a sacrifice for the national cause, the latter was criticized as senseless brushing with death and considered a violation of the law. At the popular level, however, the two forms of border-crossing share a defiant, dare-devil spirit that was cultivated in the prestate youth culture and continued in the special combat units. This spirit blurred the distinction between the national and the adventurous border-crossing, especially for young people who fit the mold of those who serve as combat soldiers.31 This ambiguity is evident in an interview with the director of Scouting Patrol, Micha Shagrir, who refers to his own adventurous crossing into the enemy territory soon after he recovered from a war-injury in 1956.32 Some of the immediate response to Blazing Sands reveals the extent to which the line between the two kinds of border-crossing became obscured at the level of popular culture. Although the film presents a fictional plot, it was criticized for its negative portrayal of the dangerous excursion and subsequent deaths in the desert. Blazing Sands was denied funding in Israel because of its so-called anti-Israeli elements, and a well-known writer of the 1948 generation, Aharon Megged, criticized it for its “groundless misrepresentation of Israeli youth.”

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Families of those killed on the way to Petra were particularly upset about the damage that the film caused to the memory of the dead.33 The heroic defiance and daring displayed by the border-crossings thus appeared more sacred to the public than adherence to the law or the consideration for preserving human lives. This approach reflects a political culture where legal violations are tolerated as normative, if not tacitly encouraged, when conceived as articulating national values. The critical and popular responses indicate that Blazing Sands was largely perceived as a commemorative text about the popular fascination with Petra which was still strong at the time and that it had the power to shape public memory.

Death in the desert: An alternative narrative Israelis’ association of the desert with death in the post-Independence period was reinforced by a succession of major wars that took place in the desert: the 1956 Sinai Campaign, the Six-Day War of 1967, the subsequent War of Attrition, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Clearly, military confrontations were not limited to the desert during that period and competing views of the desert as a site of primal nature and a place of refuge evoked other associations, drawing on the romantic approach to wilderness. But the earlier emphasis on the inherent opposition between the desert and the settlement, the primacy of the desert as a site of military practices, and the memory of the wars fought in the desert contributed to the powerful connection between the desert and death. Avanti Popolo (1986), written and directed by Rafi Bukai, introduces a bold and innovative perspective on this theme. Although the story it tells goes back to the Six-Day War, the film was produced in the aftermath of the 1982 War of Lebanon and articulates the sensibilities of its period. This was the first war that provoked Israelis to publicly question the legitimacy of its goals and to demand the establishment of an official commission to investigate Israel’s role and the army’s conduct in the events leading to the Sabra and Shatila massacres by the Christian Phalangists. The result is a cinematic work that requires the Israeli audience to probe broad issues about the nature of war and its impact on individuals as well as the conflict with the Arabs. The opening scene of Avanti Popolo begins in a highly dramatic battle scene that appears to place the film in the war movies genres. Yet one soon realizes that its point of departure—the last hour of war before a ceasefire takes effect— introduces a different interpretive framework that highlights the dissonance

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between the intensity of fighting and losing human lives and a war that is soon to end in a desert territory where the final position may have no practical consequences. When ceasefire takes effect, we see four soldiers walking away from the battlefield, two of them supporting a wounded comrade. This appears as a typical scene of Israeli soldiers on the battlefield but its surprising twist becomes clear when one hears the soldiers speak Arabic and realizes that they belong to the defeated Egyptian army. In an unprecedented move for an Israeli film, Avanti Popolo places Arab soldiers in lead roles and presents them as complex characters, played by Israeli Arabs who speak Arabic (though Palestinian Arabic and not Egyptian) and introduces their conversation to the Hebrew-speaking audience through Hebrew subtitles. More prominently than in the other films discussed here, the desert plays a pivotal role in shaping the course of events. As Bukai explained, his choice of the desert was triggered by its negative symbolic meaning as “empty space” that accentuates the absurdity of the war and its aftermath in the spirit of Ionesco’s and Becket’s works.34 But the desert also becomes a key factor in the human effort to survive that the film depicts. The Egyptian soldiers are faced with the dual challenge of surviving two simultaneous struggles: one involves man versus nature and the other stems from the national conflict. Although the war appears to be over and the risk of death should have been averted, the film shows the tenuous character of the immediate postwar experience that endangers their lives. The wounded soldier cannot survive in the desert without medical assistance and the two soldiers bury him in the sand and create a makeshift grave. When they hear Israeli soldiers’ voices at a distance, the Egyptian commander orders the two others to launch an attack, refusing to acknowledge that the war is over. A verbal argument between him and one of the soldiers who refuses his order leads to a physical fight in which the commander is killed and the two soldiers run away from the scene of death. The Egyptian soldiers now face the challenge of finding their way back to the Suez Canal and cross over to Egypt as they wander in the post-combat desert zone. Their route—walking in the desert toward Egypt as their locus of salvation—introduces a remarkable reversal of the biblical Exodus. The film follows their struggle for survival in the seemingly endless desert territory and merciless heat, without any water or food and no divine intervention. The wide-angel landscape shots and close-ups of the harsh terrain and sand dunes emphasize the Egyptians’ loneliness and hopeless situation.

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Yet the film also introduces comical scenes of their experiences in the desert that parody various facets of the war situation. In one, Israeli reserve soldiers enter a deserted structure which one of them uses as a restroom, unaware of being observed by the Egyptians. The soldier uses the historical newspaper declaring Israel’s amazing victory to wipe his ass, shrugging off his friend’s protest that he wished to keep this paper as a souvenir. Another comical scene parodies the media’s role, depicting a British journalist who, incensed that he missed the chance to shoot combat scenes, declares that the war is over only when he says so. The correspondent shows no human interest in the two live persons whom he finds there and when one of them throws up in his car, he leaves them to confront their fate in the midst of the desert. The comical streak adds a surreal touch when the two Egyptians reach a UN jeep with the seated dead body of a Swedish observer whose silent presence accompanies them as they consume his liqueur to quench their thirst, take his umbrella, and ride his jeep. Ironically, the Swede continues his role as an observer while dead and his contribution at this phase may have surpassed his effectiveness when alive. The interface between the two domains of struggle—man versus nature and the national conflict—is symbolically marked by a long shot of eagles encircling the desert landscape as they look for prey, as if sensing the fugitives’ looming death. The shot serves as a point of transition to the second part of the film, marking the Egyptians’ realization that their only chance of survival in the desert is to receive human aid. When they see an Israeli patrol of three soldiers, who like them, belong to the reserve army, they no longer try to hide but reveal their presence and beg for help. In a remarkable scene full of ironies and symbolic inversions, the desperate, drunk Egyptian soldier, an actor in his civilian life, breaks into an impromptu performance of Shylock’s monologue from “The Merchant of Venice”: “I am a Jew! Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?”35 The performance of any Shakespearean play in the desolate desert landscape and in front of enemy soldiers would have been unexpected under any circumstances. But when an Egyptian actor takes on the role of that famous fictional Jew in order to make a plea to Israeli Jews to see the human situation beyond the national context, this role-reversal produces a shocking scene imbued with irony and dark humor. Whereas a baffled Israeli soldier witnessing this performance wonders aloud what that nonsense was, another soldier recognizes the famous lines and comments: “He’s got his roles confused.” Understanding the message of this act, he calls to the others to let the two Egyptians drink water.

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After a few futile attempts to chase away the two enemy soldiers and rejecting the suggestion they receive over the wireless to shoot them, the three Israeli soldiers reluctantly let the Egyptians join them. In a powerful scene, the five Israeli and Egyptian soldiers march together in the desert terrain. When the Egyptian actor starts singing enthusiastically the Italian song Avanti Popolo (“Forward, the People,” known as Bandiera Rossa, the red flag), the others join in. The camera captures them as a single group of comrades who are marching and singing together against the darkening sky in the middle of nowhere, as if they share a common purpose and destiny. This utopian vision, accentuated by the lyrics of the socialist song, is both surreal and deeply moving. Within that liminal time and space between day and night, war and nonwar, Egypt and Israel the film offers an alternative reading of the desert not only as a site of conflict but also as a potential meeting point. As two Israeli soldiers and the two Egyptians sit together talking around a campfire at night, the scene evokes a familiar setting of comradeship within Israeli culture. The seemingly friendly scene is first disrupted by the third Israeli soldier’s rebuke of his comrades for engaging in it, and falls apart when one of the Israelis threatens an Egyptian at gun point, disturbed that the personal turn of their conversation crossed an invisible line. Any illusion of a human bond seems to disappear the next morning, when the Israelis who wake up first get away, leaving the sleeping Egyptians behind. Unaware of a warning of a minefield written in Arabic, the Israelis step into this area and set off a mine. Awaken by the blast, the Egyptians run to see what happened, read the sign, and proceed into the mined area using the Swede’s umbrella to check for mines. When they find that two soldiers are dead and one is injured, they carry the latter out of the minefield. But realizing that Israeli troops summoned by the sound of the blast approach at distance, they leave the body and run away. The Israelis, assuming that the two enemy soldiers were responsible for the explosion, kill one while the other who manages to reach the canal, is killed by Israeli and Egyptian fire from opposite sides. The meaning of Avanti Popolo is clearly constructed as a counter-mythical text in dialogue with earlier representations of the desert and war. The heightened sense of ambiguity challenges the dichotomies of homeland/enemy territory, war/peace, us/them, and good/evil that the national heroic lore typically presents. The film also subverts the mythical interpretation of the desert as a transitional space for the Jews on the way to their homeland and Arabs’ more intimate bond with it, suggesting the fluidity of shifting alliances. More broadly, Avanti Popolo

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questions the privileging of nationalism over humanity and Israelis’ claim for minimizing the tensions between the two. The film also shows the power of global communication to connect individuals across national affiliations, as it features the performance of the English Shylock monologue, the singing of the Italian Avanti Popolo, and the soldier listening to the Belgian song, Tombe la neige, while walking in the blazing desert sun. By contrast to the appeal of Western culture that first saves the Egyptians’ lives, Avanti Popolo also demonstrates the barriers created by the enemies’ lack of knowledge of each other’s languages. The Israeli soldiers’ lack of understanding of Arabic and lack of care for the Egyptians whom they ultimate desert brings on their death which might have been prevented had they taken the Egyptians along with them on their way back to their base. Although the film presents the potential for human bonding, its message is not optimistic. The film which began in violence and death ends with death. The larger force of the Israeli-Arab conflict undermines the moments of human touch and ultimately gives way to violence and destruction. The film uses dark humor and irony to help assimilate its bold symbolic inversions and antiwar message, a strategy that has often been used in Israeli culture.36 The antiwar message of Avanti Popolo is further enhanced by locating the plot in the aftermath of the official war which may have been designed to enhance the film’s universal appeal.37 Avanti Popolo started as a student project and developed into a full-length feature that was made on a limited budget. The film was met with an enthusiastic critical response that recognized it as both innovative and daring, yet it enjoyed only limited commercial success.38 Avanti Popolo was awarded Israel Critics’ Award and the Locarno Festival’s Golden Leopard in 1986. More surprisingly, it was selected as Israel’s entry for the Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards that year, though not without some strong objections from the Right for its portrayal of Egyptian soldiers as the key characters and for its antiwar position. In spite of its attempt to deliver a universalistic message and present the Arab characters’ point of view, it appears that Avanti Popolo did not get through to Arab viewers. According to a 2006 interview with Micha Shagrir, the film’s distributer, Avanti Popolo had not been screened in theaters in Egypt or the Palestinian territories, though it is possible that it has reached individual viewers after its release in DVD format.39 Thus, a film that addresses the issue of cultural bridges between Israelis and Palestinians provides further evidence of the fragility of human bonding around cultural texts within national conflicts.

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Conclusion The examination of the cinematic representations of the desert as the territory associated with passages, wars, and encounters with death reveals the dynamic character of space as a site of memory. Like other sites of memory, the meaning of the desert as a symbolic landscape has been transformed over the years along with other transformations in Israeli collective memory. The “desert” continued to be defined as a liminal space within the Zionist master commemorative narrative during the prestate and early state periods, featuring death as part of the struggle for national revival. The Hope explores the interface of the biblical and Zionist narratives in its presentation of a modern version of the Exodus. The desert continues its mythical role as a space of transition from exile to the Promised Land, and death is portrayed as necessary for the group’s revival, bringing only those deemed fit to join the Jewish pioneers in Palestine. In the post-1948 era, however, the desert emerges more clearly as the frontier of the new state and it is where the struggle to defend the country takes place. As Pillar of Fire shows, death in this front is largely constructed as an act of patriotic sacrifice that is expected and accepted as given. The trauma of individual death is minimized within the formula of death and rebirth and is portrayed as both significant and necessary. The only ones who reveal a traumatic response to the war and the renewed encounter with death are the recently arrived Holocaust survivors, and their response sets them apart from the other defenders.40 By contrast, the participation in the war effort serves as a transformational experience for a young American volunteer and completes his “conversion” into an Israeli hero. The 1960s films that feature excursions from the home sphere into the desert and farther into the enemy’s land depict these “reverse passages” as a counter-memory to the mythical Exodus. The films portray these excursions within the context of a gradual decline of Israeli national heroic lore and collectivist ethos. Shifting away from the unconditional glorification of death in the desert that was typical of earlier films, they provide a critical perspective on the passages into the desert and the subsequent encounters with death. Scouting Patrol challenges the glorification of death as an inevitable sacrifice, while Blazing Sands departs more clearly from the heroic narrative of death in the desert, presenting it as motivated by personal pursuits and involving reckless actions. The public critique of Blazing Sands reveals that the glorification of daring and defiance as heroic was still deeply ingrained in Israeli culture at the

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time and indicates the power of popular memory to contest official government positions. By the 1980s, the critical trend developed further and Avanti Popolo demonstrates the transformation of the theme of wars, passages and encounters with death in the desert. The film presents the multifaceted role of the desert as a liminal space where encounters with “the other” may have the character of violent confrontations, but may also offer the potential for subverting established categories and open the possibility for new revelations about self and others.41 Ultimately, however, Avanti Popolo shows that the pressure of the national conflict threatens such fragile connections and a hopeful moment is brought to an abrupt and violent end. Another transformation that the films reveal revolves around the cinematic portrayal of those who are considered close to the desert terrain, namely, Mizrahi Jews and the Arabs. The earlier tendency to present a stereotypical, two-dimensional character of “evil” Arabs was famously parodied in Uri Zohar’s Hole in the Moon (Hor ba’levana) in 1965.42 Scouting Patrol shows a less stereotypical image of the Arab, although like other characters in this film, it is not fully developed. Avanti Popolo presents a more dramatic departure from the earlier trend by giving the Arabs a lead role and presenting them as more personable and compassionate than some of the Israeli soldiers they encounter. Whereas Israeli films historically casted Ashkenazi actors for Mizrahi characters and Mizrahi Jews for Arabs, this film moved on to the casting of Israeli Arabs from the Galilee for the role of Egyptians. These cinematic representations of the other reveal the impact of undifferentiated categories that lump together various groups as “the other,” but they also suggest that this process is subject of a continuing pressure for greater differentiation and individuation of both self and other. In spite of significant differences between the films discussed in this essay, the desert plays a major role in all of them by virtue of its mythical role as a liminal territory of passages and transitions in Jewish memory that has been incorporated into Israeli memory. The visual appeal of the seemingly limitless, open landscape, the impressive natural forms of its rocks and dunes, the difficult and treacherous climatic conditions and the terrain itself contributes to the choice of the desert as a powerful and challenging setting for films. It is not surprising therefore that the camera often gives considerable attention to the desert landscape. The desert photography contributes to the overall aesthetic dimension of the film, but it also enhances the themes of struggle and danger by highlighting the dramatic contrast between man and nature. Given the historical

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role of the desert in the American West, the western became a major source of influence on the shaping of Israeli desert films.43 This last theme leads us back to the issue of the interweaving of memory and space in films related to the theme of passages, wars, and encounters with death. On the one hand the discussion of these films reveals the interplay between the multiple layers of memory, including mythical Jewish memory, Zionist memory, and more recent Israeli memory. On the other hand, the films disclose the growing impact of non-Israeli influences on Israeli culture and the ways in which they are interwoven into it. Thus, the conventions of the American western tradition have been instrumental in highlighting the traditional Jewish theme of passage and transition in the desert and adding to its appeal on the Israeli screen. Moreover, Avanti Popolo demonstrates the extent to which canonic texts of an increasingly global culture offer the possibility of communication that carries beyond national boundaries which national languages and national lore posit as impossible. In an age marked by the increasingly accessible cultural texts and forms of communication, such bridges further challenge and expand the boundaries of national memories.

Notes I would like to thanks Dr Dror Yizhar for his helpful suggestions during my work at the Film Library of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. Thanks also to Omri Grinberg for his assistance in collecting some of the sources for this essay. 1 Maurice Halbwachs, La Mémoire collective. 1950. English translation, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1980) and On Collective Memory, edited, translated and with introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). For a major anthology in this field, see Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds, The Collective Memory Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For a further discussion of my approach to the study of collective memory, see Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3–13. 2 Yael Zerubavel, “The ‘Death of Memory’ and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors,” Representations 45 (Winter 1994): 72–100; Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s: Ideology and Memory (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2007); Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flags: Youths Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity

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(New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from its Ashes, trans. Israel Amrani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). On the distinction between place and space, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), and Donald W. Meinig, introduction to The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 1–7. For the role of film and television in shaping collective memory see, for example, Henri Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991);Yosefa Loshitzky, ed., Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Gary R. Edgerton and Peter C. Rollins, eds, Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001); Allison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). On the importance of imprint of the Exodus on Jewish ritual and memory, see Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 11–12, 43–4, and 108, n. 5. For the discussion of national narratives in the Bible, see Ilana Pardes, The Biography of Ancient Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On the Zionist reinterpretation of the Exodus paradigm, see Charles S. Liebman and Eliezer Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 49–50, 122. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [1974], translated from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Backwell, 1991); on the concept of “social space,” 26–39, 77. Yael Zerubavel, “The Desert and the Settlement as Symbolic Landscapes in Modern Israeli Culture,” in Jewish Topographies Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke. Heritage, Culture and Identity Series (London and Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008), 201–22. For the tree as a symbolic representation of national revival in the Hebrew culture and its transformation, see Yael Zerubavel, “The Forest as a National Icon: Literature, Politics, and the Archeology of Memory,” Israel Studies 1 (Spring 1996): 60–99. Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 100; Liebman and Don-Yehiya, Civil Religion in Israel, 28–55. Hanan Hever points out the emphasis on land journey in Mizrahi immigrant narratives as a liminal space of transition as compared to the sea for those who came from Europe. See “We Have Not Arrived from the Sea: A Mizrahi Literary Geography,” Social Identities 10, 1 (2004): 31–3.

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11 Shoshana Damari was born in Yemen in 1923 and the family immigrated to Israel the following year, yet she was versed in Yemenite Jewish music and culture. The Hope was her second film and the first in which she had a lead role. Her brother, Saadia Damari, was cast in the film too. www.zemereshet.co.il/biography. asp?artists_id=406&id=157 [in Hebrew], accessed May 25, 2011. 12 For a discussion of the various interpretations of pioneering, see Daniel Guttwein, “On the Contradiction between the Pioneering Ethos and the Socialist Ideology in the Israeli Labor Movement,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel [in Hebrew] 20 (2010): 208–28. See in particular his discussion of David Ben-Gurion’s “pioneering retirement ethos” (225) that implies redirecting the pioneering ethos toward the new immigrants as objects rather than agents of pioneering. On the prevalent use of “immigrants” [mehagrim] in reference to Middle Eastern Jews, compared to “pioneers” (halutzim) and olim, the ideologically motivated Jewish new comers, see Gershon Shafir and Yoav Peled, Being Israelis: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 76–7. 13 Nitza Druyan, Without a Magic Carpet: Yemenite Settlement in Eretz Israel, 1881– 1914 [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1981). 14 Habib explains his motivation to focus on Middle Eastern Jews in a later interview with Nirit Aderman, “Why Was the First Entirely Israeli Film Censored?” Haaretz [in Hebrew], March 29, 2010; www.mouse.co.il/CM.articles_item,1050,209,47624,. aspx, accessed May 25, 2011. 15 Nathan Gross and Yaacov Gross, The Hebrew Film: The History of the Silent Film and Cinema in Israel [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: authors’ edition, 1991), 208. 16 One should note, though, adaptations were made for mainstream Israeli and Western audiences, such as the representation of Middle Eastern music by score composed by a well-known Israeli composer, Moshe Vilensky, who was of Ashkenazi origin. See also Moshe Zimmerman, Hole in the Camera: Gazes of Israeli Cinema [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2003), 173–81. On the representation of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli films, see Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 115–78. 17 Rachel Weissbrod, “Exodus as a Zionist Melodrama,” Israel Studies 4 (Spring 1999): 129–52; N. M. Silver, Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010). 18 Gross and Yaacov Gross, The Hebrew Film, 242–3; Nirit Anderman, “Editing Out a Frame of History,” Haaretz [in Hebrew], March 18, 2011. 19 On the myth of a few against many see Nurith Gertz, Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000), 5–26. 20 For a further discussion of the struggle theme in settlement narratives, see Yael Zerubavel, “The Conquest of the Desert and the Settlement Ethos,” in The Desert

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Experience in Israel: Communities, Arts, Science, and Education in the Negev, ed. A. Paul Hare and Gideon Kressel (Lanham: The University Press of America, 2009), 33–44. Quoted in Elchanan Orren, “The Settlements in the Negev Battles during the War of Independence,” in The Settlement of the Negev, 1900–1960 [in Hebrew], ed. Mordechai Naor (Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1985), 105. Ella Shohat suggests a different interpretation of “pillar of fire” as an allusion to Holocaust survivors who were referred to in Hebrew as “remnants of fire” (Israeli Cinema, 70). Nesia Shafran, “The Red Rock in Retrospect,” in Documenting: The Old Land of Israel [in Hebrew], ed. Aharon Amir (Ramat Gan: Masada, 1979), 10–16, rpt. in www.202.org.il/Pages/moreshet/petra/petra/shfran.php, accessed July 20, 2011. Haim Hefer, a popular song writer, wrote the lyrics of “The Red Rock” and Yohanan Zarai composed its music. The song was recorded and its broadcasting was censored in 1958. Accessed July 20, 2011, www.202.org.il/Pages/moreshet/petra/ petra_main.php. See also Nesia Shafran, “The Reflection of the Excursions to Petra in Hebrew Literature,” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel [in Hebrew] 9 (1999): 490–524. See Michael Ohad, “Four that Are Five,” Haaretz [in Hebrew], September 9, 1967, 20–1, 38, from the file of Scouting Patrol at the Film Library of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. Micha Shagrir explained his intention to present a more balanced view of the famous commando soldiers of the 1950s who were subject to either idealization or demonization for their reprisal operations across the border. See Nathan Gross, “The Scouts Are Coming . . .” Al Hamishmar [in Hebrew], September 26, 1967, from the file of Scouts Patrol at the Film Library of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque. Shohat, Israeli Cinema, 75–6; see her discussion of the image of the Arab in Israeli film at that period, 73–103. The choice of the dead man’s name, Amichai (literally, “my people is alive”) suggests the importance of the soldier’s sacrifice for national survival. The lyrics (“Don’t cry, my friends, over Amichai [. . .], he lives forever, Amichai”) present him as if he were still living. The theme of the living dead is known in other cultures and was central to the 1948 memorial literature. See George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 70–8; Zerubavel, Recovered Roots, 91–5; Hannan Hever, “The Poetry of the National Body: Female Poets in the War of Independence,” Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew] 7 (1995): 103–14. For criticism of the ending of the film in otherwise positive reviews, see Michael Ohad, “Four that Are Five” [in Hebrew]; Yosef Srik, “Israeli—In Its Best,” Haaretz [in Hebrew], November 17, 1967 from the file of Scouting Patrol at the Film Library of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, June 2011.

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29 See, for example, The Hero’s Wife, directed by Peter Frye (1963) and Siege, directed by Gilberto Tofano (1969). For further discussion of the image of the war widow, see Yael Zerubavel, “Coping with the Legacy of Death: The War Widow in Israeli Films,” in Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, ed. Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 84–95. 30 Gross and Gross, The Hebrew Film, 243–4; 95; Meir Schnitzr, Israeli Cinema [in Hebrew] (Or Yehuda: Kineret, 1994), 51. Other reviews found in the Blazing Sands file at the Film Library of Tel Aviv Cinematheque have incomplete publication info: “The Director of Blazing Sands Declares, ‘Israel is a third-world country’,” Yediot Ahronot [in Hebrew], October 10, 1960; Ze’ev Rav-Nof, “The Petra Scrolls,” Davar [in Hebrew], 1965, n.d.; “Blazing Sands,” in Omanut Hakolno’a [in Hebrew] 21 (August 1960): 14; Heda Boshes, “What Was the Fuss About?” Haaretz [in Hebrew], September 30, 1960. 31 For further information about those who went on the adventurous excursions to Petra, see Shafran, “The Red Rock in Retrospect.” 32 Quoted in Gross, “The Scouts Are Coming . . .” It is interesting to note that Ram Pargai, one of those who went to Petra and was killed, began practicing for this excursion after he recovered from injury he suffered in a reprisal military operation. www.202.org.il/Pages/moreshet/petra/zar.php [in Hebrew], accessed May 26, 2011. 33 Ze’ev Rav-Nof, “The Petra Scrolls”; “Blazing Sands,” in Omanut Hakolno’a; and Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: The Open University, 1993), 18–19. 34 Renen Schorr and Yael Shuv, “Shylock in the Desert,” in Avanti Popolo, Scripts 2 [in Hebrew], ed. Renen Schorr and Orly Lubin (Or Yehuda: Kineret, 1990), 78; Caryn James, “Israeli Depicts Two Egyptians Lost in Sinai,” film review New York Times, April 19, 1989, http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=950DE2D61239F93 AA25757C0A96F948260, accessed August 25, 2011. 35 Bukai credits the reference to Shylock’s monologue to Uri Avineri’s editorial about the Lebanon War in Hayom Haze issue for the Jewish New Year in 1982. See Schorr and Shuv, “Shylock in the Desert,” 79 and in a live interview with him on the 2006 DVD of Avanti Popolo [in Hebrew]. 36 See Yael Zerubavel, “Patriotic Sacrifice and the Burden of Memory in Israeli Secular National Hebrew Culture,” in Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 77–100. On the impact of black humor in this film, see Noam Boxbaum, “Memories from the Desert,” Mouse Online [in Hebrew], November 23, 2006 www.mouse.co.il/CM.articles_item,682,209,7372,.aspx, accessed August 25, 2011.

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37 Ravid Oren, “What’s Different?” NRG Maariv Cultural Magazine [in Hebrew], November 22, 2006, www.nrg.co.il/online/47/ART1/508/478.html, accessed August 25, 2011. 38 Schorr and Shuv, “Shylock in the Desert,” 75–6, 95; Oren, “What’s Different?”; Boxbaum, “Memories from the Desert.” 39 Quoted in Oren, “What’s Different?” 40 On the portrayal of Holocaust survivors as Others in Israeli films, see Nurith Gertz, Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004); Liat Steir-Livny, “Near and Far: The Representations of Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Feature Films,” in Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, ed. Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 168–80. 41 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 126–9. 42 In Hole in the Moon, Uri Zohar presents a parody of the conventional negative portrayal of the Arabs in Israeli films in featuring Arab actors begging the director to give them a chance to act as “good Arabs.” 43 Nurith Gertz offers an interesting perspective on the influence of the western on Israeli films. See Motion Fiction, 70–83. Uri Zohar typically addresses this theme by creating a parody of the western in Hole in the Moon.

Bibliography Burg, Avraham. The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes. Translated by Israel Amrani. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Druyan, Nitza. Without a Magic Carpet: Yemenite Settlement in Eretz Israel, 1881–1914 [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1981. Edgerton, Gary R. and Peter C. Rollins, eds. Television Histories: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2001. Feldman, Jackie. Above the Death Pits, Beneath the Flags: Youths Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Gertz, Nurith. Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema and Literature [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004. —. Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: The Open University, 1993. —. Myths in Israeli Culture: Captives of a Dream. London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000. Gross, Nathan and Yaacov Gross. The Hebrew Film: The History of the Silent Film and Cinema in Israel [in Hebrew]. Jerusalem: authors’ edition, 1991.

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Guttwein, Daniel. “On the Contradiction between the Pioneering Ethos and the Socialist Ideology in the Israeli Labor Movement.” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel [in Hebrew] 20 (2010): 208–28. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. Translated by Francis J. and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. —. On Collective Memory. Edited, translated and with introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hever, Hannan. “The Poetry of the National Body: Female Poets in the War of Independence.” Theory and Criticism [in Hebrew] 7 (1995): 103–14. Hever, Hanan. “We Have Not Arrived from the Sea: A Mizrahi Literary Geography.” Social Identities 10, 1 (2004): 31–51. Landsberg, Allison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1974. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Backwell, 1991. Liebman, Charles S. and Eliezer Don-Yehiya. Civil Religion in Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Loshitzky, Yosefa, ed. Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Meinig, Donald W., ed. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Mosse, George L. Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Olick, Jeffrey K., Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds. The Collective Memory Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Orren, Elchanan. “The Settlements in the Negev Battles during the War of Independence,” in The Settlement of the Negev, 1900–1960 [in Hebrew], edited by Mordechai Naor, 100–27. Jerusalem: Yad Itzhak Ben-Zvi, 1985. Pardes, Ilana. The Biography of Ancient Israel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Rousso, Henri. The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Schnitzr, Meir. Israeli Cinema [in Hebrew]. Or Yehuda: Kineret, 1994. Schorr, Renen and Yael Shuv. “Shylock in the Desert.” In Avanti Popolo, Scripts 2 [in Hebrew], edited by Renen Schorr and Orly Lubin, 74–96. Or Yehuda: Kineret, 1990. Shafir, Gershon and Yoav Peled. Being Israelis: The Dynamics of Multiple Citizenship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Shafran, Nesia. “The Red Rock in Retrospect.” In Documenting: The Old Land of Israel [in Hebrew], edited by Aharon Amir, 10–16. Ramat Gan: Masada, 1979. —. “The Reflection of the Excursions to Petra in Hebrew Literature.” Iyunim Bitkumat Israel [in Hebrew] 9 (1999): 490–524.

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Shandler, Jeffrey. While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Shohat, Ella. Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. Silver, N. M. Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Stauber, Roni. The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s: Ideology and Memory. London: Valentine Mitchell, 2007. Steir-Livny, Liat. “Near and Far: The Representations of Holocaust Survivors in Israeli Feature Films.” In Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, edited by Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg, 168–80. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Weissbrod, Rachel. “Exodus as a Zionist Melodrama.” Israel Studies 4 (Spring 1999): 129–52. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. Zerubavel, Eviatar. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Zerubavel, Yael. “The Conquest of the Desert and the Settlement Ethos.” In The Desert Experience in Israel: Communities, Arts, Science, and Education in the Negev, edited by A. Paul Hare and Gideon Kressel, 33–44. Lanham: The University Press of America, 2009. —. “Coping with the Legacy of Death: The War Widow in Israeli Films.” In Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, edited by Miri Talmon and Yaron Peleg, 84–95. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011. —. “The ‘Death of Memory’ and the Memory of Death: Masada and the Holocaust as Historical Metaphors.” Representations 45 (Winter 1994): 72–100. —. “The Desert and the Settlement as Symbolic Landscapes in Modern Israeli Culture.” In Jewish Topographies Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, edited by Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt, and Alexandra Nocke, 201–22. Heritage, Culture and Identity Series. London and Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008. —. “The Forest as a National Icon: Literature, Politics, and the Archeology of Memory.” Israel Studies 1 (Spring 1996): 60–99. —. “Patriotic Sacrifice and the Burden of Memory in Israeli Secular National Hebrew Culture.” In Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Ussama Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein, 77–100. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. —. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Zimmerman, Moshe. Hole in the Camera: Gazes of Israeli Cinema [in Hebrew]. Tel Aviv: Resling, 2003.

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13

“Walking through walls”: Documentary Film and Other Technologies of Navigation, Aspiration, and Memory Janet Walker

There are always holes in the wall for us to evade and the improbable to slip in. Siegfried Kracauer (1969; 1995)1 Availing myself of the Google Earth geographic information program, I “fly to” the modern city of Modi’in, Israel from my study in Santa Barbara, California.2 The virtual globe spins below me as I navigate across North America and the Atlantic Ocean, and on across North Africa and the Mediterranean Sea. I arrive with ease, unhampered by features of the landscape and borderlines, and untroubled by stony remains in the vicinity of my destination. Yet if I look around as I settle down to earth, I can see the regular contours of planned communities and patches of forested land. And if I turn on Google Earth’s “Borders and Labels” layer, I notice Modi’in’s proximity to the 1949 Armistice Agreement Line otherwise known as the Green Line demarcating Israel from the occupied West Bank. As a US citizen who is Jewish and a documentary scholar, I approach this land with respect for the challenges of inhabiting, filming, thinking and writing about, and moving in and around this troubled region. Keenly aware that I have much to learn (and that there are things I will never know or will know only differently and from the outside3) about how residents’ lives are affected by the struggle for territory and the debates about the legalities and ethics of Israeli state policies and actions, I proceed.4

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This chapter aims to explore documentary film and other technologies of navigation via a “spatial turn” in trauma studies for which I advocate as a pursuit of spatial media studies, itself a sub-field of the discipline of film and media studies.5 Inspired by the documentary 9 Star Hotel (Ido Haar, 2007, Israel)—about the lives of Palestinian workers whose progress across the landscape is infinitely more treacherous than my virtual touring—and specific layers imported into Google Earth, the essay will discuss how each of these texts, in its respective mobilization of certain “transference sites,”6 exemplifies a flexible spatial practice that unblocks passages, remembers, and possibly even reconciles traumatic space and place7 in Israel/Palestine. A corresponding strategy of spatialized documentary film analysis is needed, I believe. This chapter therefore strives to develop both the geopolitical implications of site-seeing as a documentary practice and the epistemological implications of mapping as a mode of critical reading.8

Blocking/Transference Set literally at the roadblocks or checkpoints where people wait and are detained, and from which many are turned back, the documentaries Anat Zanger analyzes in her essay “Blind Space: Roadblock Movies in the Contemporary Israeli Film,”9 among others one could nominate,10 depict the tension between the Israeli effort to block or control movement across a given space and the arduous and often frustrated attempts by Palestinians to cross or pierce these boundaries for purposes of family, work, or medical treatment. Such films may be read as sympathetic to the petitioners, and in this way resonant—if not necessarily in accordance—with the Palestinian nationalist call for open borders and right of return. In the Israeli roadblock cycle, would-be return is “suspended”11 in time and space; enacted as an extended arabesque of dispossession over and against the Palestinians’ undesired or unachievable alternatives of centripetal assimilation into Israeli society or centrifugal scattering into the diaspora. Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi identify an alternate strategy in the many recent Palestinian films dealing with blocked access: that of “striv[ing] to reconstruct an imaginary harmonious space out of the fragmented blocked one” (my emphasis).12 Even films that do represent bodily return to the spots in Israel from which families were expelled in 1948 tend to render time as suspended between the

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past and the future, and space as inaccessible and frozen. This is due in large part to the fact that these “returns” are, by necessity of war and state politics, merely temporary visits or spatially approximate. In Biram (Ashes, Rima Essa, 2001, Palestine/Israel), for example, the filmmaker and her mother walking on the road pass a sign pointing to the Israeli Kibbutz Bar’am established on the land of Biram. “They demolished the house and stole all the bricks,” we hear said. “So we would have no hope of returning. But we never lost hope. Even if I’m dead, I’ll return . . . Either on our legs, or on someone’s shoulders.” The family are Israeli citizens living 4 kilometers away in Jish, but they must elude the guard to pick olives from their former orchard. The Roof (2006, Palestine/Germany) ends with the Palestinian-Israeli filmmaker Kamal Aljafari reminding his mother (presumably for the upteenth time) that it would feel “strange” to finish remodeling the half-built second story of the house where the family has lived for a generation since finding refuge there in 1948, because it “doesn’t belong to us.” But what if we were to regard the protagonists’ and the filmmakers’ trajectories in these films as productively complicating the topography of Israel/ Palestine? With all due respect for the historical and hard realities of expulsion, expropriation, confinement, and agonizing delay—and for the reading of the roadblock film as a critique of blocked space—what if we were to flex our critical muscles and lift from critical human geography a de-essentialized notion of place that comprehends features of the landscape as both material in nature and necessarily produced through existing and evolving structures of knowledge and power?13 Zanger brilliantly reconceptualizes Israel’s roadblocks and checkpoints, and the filmic representation thereof, as an infrastructure of contact and mixing. “Because [the checkpoint] is located in an intermediate space that is neither on the one side nor on the other,” she writes, it “creates the effect of a meeting place between specific identities that it seeks to simultaneously define and conceal” (3). “Transference sites,” in Zanger’s reading, “insist on purity, distinction, and difference” while at the same time facilitating “contamination and mixing”: they are “imaginary, fluid, and always in the process of change” (4). For her, the roadblock movies are notable precisely for their ability to present these borderline physical locations as “heterogeneous meeting points located in the indeterminate space between surveillance, prejudice, and fears” (3). She therefore sees their potential for helping us resist instead of reiterate the impenetrability and fundamentalist sense of ownership of Israeli and Palestinian nationalism.

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What would it mean, we may ask accordingly, deliberately to extend the liminal space Zanger identifies to the territory of Israel/Palestine; to see that broader whole and not just the checkpoints and border zones as a “transference site” of contestation and expressivity? And further, given the psychoanalytic dimension invoked by the word “transference” and lived as psychic suffering by people whose movements are hampered, what would it mean to understand the space of Israel/Palestine as “unassimilable” in Caruthian terms? As I have discussed elsewhere,14 where Cathy Caruth has theorized trauma as a psychic structure of experience characterized by temporal “belatedness,” she couches her ideas in language that suggests a related spatial indeterminacy, multiplicity, or unassimilability. “The impact of a traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness,” Caruth has written, and “in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time,” and “in connection with another place and time.”15 The rich debate that Caruth’s influential work has inspired about psychic temporality and the historical truths and enigmas that traumatic experience arguably renders, has not been accompanied by sustained attention to these spatial aspects, present but less developed in her writing.16 Applying to the case of Israel/Palestine this notion of unassimilable space— the propensity of a traumatic event to pop up outside the lines, resist simple location, and/or reside in psychic space—we might effect a geopolitical move that resists, as does Zanger, the disjunctive spatiality through which the region is typically mapped. A more complicated cartography might be designed; one that accepts these spaces, including texts, as already multiply inhabited, if often by “irreconcilable cultural positions.”17

Mapping documentary Several shot sequences of furious physical exertion lend structure to 9 Star Hotel. We see young men running, dodging traffic, striving breathlessly uphill and down the rocky terrain, porting their belongings and flinging them across a river, seeking the cover of trees and of the night: “infiltrating” Israel (as indicated in the opening, explanatory title) from the Palestinian village of al-Midya to work in the construction of Jewish homes. In the first of these sequences, pine trees in the landscape form an undulating border between forest and scrub, the former constituting “the blooming desert” of Zionist discourse. A nearby settlement

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(Hashmona’im) is introduced on the horizon. The movement of machines, men, and animals builds shot by shot until, suddenly, a group of men dash across a dirt road into the forest and, in the subsequent shot, hurry along a forest-adjacent path. The next shots are much closer. Now we see the faces of young men, including Muchamad, one of the two main protagonists. The camera trails in line and Ido Haar, acting as cinematographer as well as director, captures the strenuousness of the journey, and one man’s twisted ankle. Then, out of the forest onto the road, the group crosses toward the camera and in the next shot passes it by. There is a primal cinematic quality to this “chase film” construction, complete with successive obstacles and mishaps. Only, at this point in the film, the men are not literally being chased but rather exist in a condition of threatened, imminent capture. This is how they make their way to work. Although we approach only a single checkpoint (the film is defined by the exertions of those seeking to avoid such spots), this area of a few square miles in which the film takes place is certainly a “transference site” of the most painful variety. Here pertain the paradoxical properties Zanger has noticed: of “purity, distinction, and difference” (these people chase after those people) and at the same time “contamination and mixing” (these people chase after those people). A tense mutuality pervades this space: catching interlopers occupies the police, while building the homes of the police and their fellow Israeli citizens occupies the laborers. The area of transference may be construed as even wider if we consider not only what is actually seen in the film but also what we learn from observing the men’s cell phone connectivity and attending to their and the filmmaker’s geographic references. For example, in a second “sneaking in” sequence, Ahmad, a friend of Muchamad and the other person in the pair of young protagonists (the police call them “juveniles,” at least as translated from the Hebrew), has broken his ankle. He is caught and taken into custody. Shortly thereafter he is released to friends who deliver him for treatment to a hospital in Ramallah. From there he returns to his home in Yatta, and, after a short period of healing, he returns to work.18 In another sequence, Muchamad faints and is borne away to the hospital by a friend with a car. Previously, he had alluded to looking for work in Jerusalem. That Ido Haar is a more privileged occupant of the place, is brought home in one particular moment in the film where security guards on bicycles patrolling a neighborhood of Modi’in under construction comment to Haar, in a kind of stage whisper, “We are looking for illegal workers.” Elsewhere in the film he stands

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in plain sight on a road—paradoxically less visible to the border patrol than his Palestinian companions hiding in the forest for whom all eyes are peeled—as jeeps on patrol come and go. But Haar, as an Israeli citizen, is not permitted to visit Ramallah (though many of us go where we are not supposed to). I imagine his directionality vectors and Ahmad’s crossing and diverging: Haar moves freely among Tel Aviv, Modi’in, Jerusalem, and his family home in the “no man’s” land at the Green Line, and less freely into the West Bank; the workers move around the West Bank, including Ramallah, with sporadic, risky forays into Modi’in and elsewhere in Israel. Objects too describe a spatially wide network—that of the global consumer culture in which the workers also participate. The primary-colored plastic ride-along toy that Ahmad salvages from town and displays inside one of the makeshift dwellings will likely end up in his home village (and for that matter, and to emphasize the expansive cartography that connects so many of us, I recognize that toy as one my own daughter enjoyed, complete with cracked steering wheel assembly and satisfying horn toot sound). It is the film’s compositional and cinematographic expansiveness and multi-directionality, I submit, that makes of territory a transference site and, in Henri Lefebvre’s terms, an imaginative and constructive “space of representation.” In fact the creative use of place and space in 9 Star Hotel forms a limit case of documentary film in general. While contemporary documentary studies is founded on the project of exposing the narrative and also fictive elements of documentary film, the spatial referentiality of documentary in general is to my mind equally illusory, and, as with the spatial referentially of trauma, equally neglected. Cinematography and montage in any documentary where people and environments are depicted—and even, perhaps especially, in site-specific documentaries where place matters profoundly—necessarily constitute the places and objects which the shooting and editing seem only to document mechanically and observationally.19 Curious about the material path taken by the Palestinian workers in 9 Star Hotel and where they camped, I contacted Ido Haar. Thanks to his generosity, there ensued a series of Skype conversations and the creation of more than a dozen maps to describe these spaces, two of which are provided here as Figures 13.1 and 13.2.20 As noted at the start, I envision this cartographic practice as a mode of textual analysis and spatialized epistemology in tune with critical human geography’s foundational conviction that geography is more than “the charting of land masses, climate zones, elevations, bodies of water,” and so

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Figure 13.1 The assumed path of workers in and out of Israel; map by Greg Eliason and Janet Walker.

Figure 13.2 The construction of space through the first 32 shots of 9 Star Hotel; map by Greg Eliason and Janet Walker.

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on. The premise of this particular field of geography, emphasizes Irit Rogoff, acknowledging the inspiration of Henri Lefebvre, is that geography is “a body of knowledge and an order of knowledge which requires the same kind of critical theorization as any other body of knowledge.”21 As an anti-essentializing enterprise, therefore, critical human geography can disrupt “moralizing discourse[s]” about “who has the right to be where and how it ought to be so” and supposedly definitive cartographies.22 The ground beneath and beyond our feet, and in 9 Star Hotel, is simultaneously real and imaginary; solid and constantly shifting; proprioceptively and representationally sensed; already claimed, and, felicitously, in Irit Rogoff ’s term, “unhomed.” Definite spatial division may well be the fantasy of the divisive. Instead of a defined scheme of screen direction in which movement into Israel is always, say, from the northeast to the southwest, and movement back to Palestine the reverse, the bodily movements we see in 9 Star Hotel proceed in all six directions in relation to the cinematic frame, including away from the camera, toward it, and blowing right by (not to mention up hill and down which I have yet to figure out how to render in 3-D). Editorially as well, the shots that make up each sequence are pieced together from footage that is temporally asynchronous and spatially noncontiguous: shot at different times, out of temporal order, and according to a spatial logic beholden less to a pre-given path in the scrub than to a representational practice through which the path and its meaning are jointly created. Figure 13.2 in comparison with Figure 13.1 represents the rather more disparate physical locations and camera directions of the first 32 shots of the film as identified for me by Ido Haar. I intend this comparison to demonstrate, not so much where any body walked, but rather the inevitable constructedness of even this most painfully site-specific of films.

“Treefurcation” W. J. T. Mitchell writes that “[l]andscape is a natural scene mediated by culture . . . both a real place and its simulacrum.”23 The “treescape,” to borrow the term from Irus Braverman, with which 9 Star Hotel opens is itself a “work of landscape” or “technology of cultivation” in the service of the Zionist project.24 Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jewish National Fund, with the benefit of donations from the Jewish diaspora, has planted more than 240 million trees, most of them in coniferous forests.25 Enacting and exemplifying efforts to cultivate the

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desert and Europeanize the landscape, these pines have rooted diasporic Jews and Jewish claims to the territory and ultimately the Israeli state. Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory remembers sticking “small green leaves to a paper tree” at his Hebrew school in London to register another sixpence collected for the Jewish National Fund. “The trees were our proxy immigrants, the forests our implantation.” Behind the tree planting, he writes, “lay a long, rich, and pagan tradition that imagined forests as the primal birthplace of nations; the beginning of habitation.”26 I too, from my California suburb, planted trees in Israel for Tu B’Shevat. And, in an example of the wild intertwining of Israeli and American state iconography along with the complex layering of memorial culture, somehow my fallen president’s head hovered over the Israeli forest I helped plant in honor of my dead grandfather for the state of Ben Gurion (Figure 13.3). Fast growing and needing little tending, durable, long living, and visually distinct, the pine tree by virtue of its “robust legibility,” explains Irus Braverman, is a “favorite artifact in the eyes of the state.”27 As many readers will know, these forests not only demarcate and secure Israeli territory, but also bring it into being, since, under Article 78 of the Ottoman Land Code, a longtime cultivator of an area of land is afforded the right of possession. Afforestation has long been used to lay claim to supposedly

Figure 13.3 Planting trees in Israel. Certificate courtesy of the author with permission from the Jewish National Fund.

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undeveloped, uncultivated, and unowned lands. The Jewish National Fund has established parks on the sites of more than 80 former Arab villages, abandoned or depopulated between 1947 and 1949 and destroyed at that time or subsequently.28 Pressure for recognition of this practice has been brought to bear by Zochrot, an organization that supports Palestinian return and memorialization through archeological and mapping efforts to locate and describe the disposition of houses, mosques, and public buildings in these former villages.29 Walking the paths of a former village, stopping here and there where a house once stood to hammer a sign into the ground, the members and guests of Zochrot emplant another, reappropriative kind of signifying grove. The treatment of the forestlands in 9 Star Hotel also functions, in places, in this reappropriative manner. In the first sneaking in sequence and also, similarly, in another wadi-crossing passage, the trees are adapted to the Palestinian workers’ own purpose. When they duck for cover into the pine forest, their use of it and the observation and filming of that use by Haar standing on the road, illustrate the malleability of ostensibly tangible and fixed geographical features of the land. The undulating border described by the conifers in the film’s first few shots and the fact of this species in the no man’s land between Israel and the occupied territory are a kind of would-be hardscaping made soft through the “cultivation” of this forest as a hiding place by the workers in the film.

“This is a 9 star hotel” While the stars in the eponymous “hotel” may suggest a rating of high-quality and luxurious amenities, in reality the men sleep in makeshift huts on the hillside, exposed to extremes of temperature and to the elements. Or they sleep in individual cubicles of cardboard, blankets, and plastic; or right out under the stars. That they themselves are keenly aware of the irony of their plight—working as labors building Jewish homes while camping illegally, subject to capture at any point and in this sense homeless—is highlighted in one particular sequence. Ahmad seated on the ground with the others looking on, stacks stones, one on top of the other. Playfully, with the glee of a child and the life experience of a man, he holds a rock to his ear and places an order for ten tons of iron and ten tons of cement. “This is a 9 star hotel,” we hear over a close-up of the tower, just as it topples. Elsewhere in the film, such ironies of home and shelter multiply. The workers come across some Jewish children building a “wooden house, camp” on

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the outskirts of their compound. “I told you I’m a bit scared of Arabs,” comments one boy, perhaps willing to stick around because of the presence of Haar with his camera. “Doesn’t your mother ask you, ‘Where were you?’ ‘Where are you going?’.” “She knows we’re here,” comes the reply. Not exactly, we gather. The children ask the workers if they might bring two more iron rods to shore up the camp. Throughout the narrative, the men’s conversations with one another are by turns astute and naïve, frivolous and frustrated, accepting and rebellious, and concerned with the future as well as the past. Consider the following snippets of conversation: “Our problem is that at 12, we already think about women and marriage.” “That’s right.” “Arabs only think about their dicks.” “When your father sees you’re 12, he says to himself, ‘The boy has grown it’s time I marry him off.’ But the boy is still an adolescent. His sexual drive, his sexual drive is strong. So when you turn 13 and your father says, ‘I’ve seen your cousin,’ you can bet you’ll end up marrying her. Five or six years later, the boy wakes up and says to himself, ‘My father forced me to marry my cousin. I want to choose a woman.’ So he goes and marries again. He has five kids with each of them. Soon enough he has to pull his 12 year old out of school to help earn money. You understand? We think backwards. We never think ahead.”

Over a shot of Abu Halil, an older man in the group, as they hunker down, sheltering from the rain: “Same as yesterday—no work.” “We came for nothing.” “I worked only today and I’ve been here two weeks.”

Or this: “We got used to working in Israel.” “When they finish the wall we won’t be able to sneak in.” “Without a permit you’ll be shut out.” “Two more months, three at the most.” “But the worst place is Jerusalem. The lowest you can get.”

Further ambitions: “I want to join the Palestinian forces . . .” “They only take people who can read and write . . .”

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“In tests I’d always make up my own answers . . .” “Now we’re sorry . . .” “Yes, school days were the best days.”

The youth of these workers, a number of whom have had to become the family’s sole breadwinner at a young age, their camaraderie, and their aspirations are brought home by the film’s graceful observation and juxtaposition of spontaneous conversation and arduous labor. As is evident, the primary goal of this chapter is to locate trauma as a spatial matter. Consequently, I have dealt mainly with the mise-en-scène and editorial regimes of bodies, movement, and environment. But the men’s own voices also conjure the pathways of belonging and unbelonging to this place, and they conjure as well its traumatic historical context. One of the intimate conversations filmed by Ido Haar concerns the moment of silence observed on Yom Hashoa, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day. “Tomorrow at 10:00 there’s a siren. All the Jews stand still not moving left or right like statues,” observes a worker in a blue shirt sitting up in bed. “They stop their cars. They get out of their cars, even if they’re on the highway. The police, everyone.” “What if I talk to someone?” another man queries. “He won’t answer until the siren stops,” comes the response. At night, from their beds, the men converse about this topic respectfully, seemingly in awe of the number of Jewish people murdered, using the terms “killed” and “murdered,” as translated by the English subtitles. “6 million—the same number as the Palestinians” [meaning the Palestinian population], someone remarks, over a shot of another man rising to a seated position. “Yes, just like the Palestinians and that’s only those who died.” The men make the connection between this Jewish commemoration of wartime deaths and the Nakba without broaching the conventionally disjunctive trope of Israeli Independence versus the Nakba: “They have a memorial day and we don’t.” “Yes, we do. Didn’t they say on TV, it’s been 55 years since the Palestinian catastrophe?” The men exchange historical information, relating the catastrophes of these two peoples. The workers’ perspective contains none of the animosity one might well acknowledge as justified, given the wartime usurpation of Palestinian lands now within the Israeli borders and the continuing occupation of the West Bank. The main impetus stems from a practical consideration: “If they [the murdered Jews] were still alive, where would they all live? We would have to build houses for them. 6 million, good god! If each had just one child, that’s 12 million.” This

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is the conversation of working men everywhere: needing the work for pay—in reality, the more work there is, the better for the earner—and at the same time wanting it not to be too much, eager to accomplish it all. The injustices and inequalities of the actual and imagined situations are evident to me as to the workers. But the point I wish to emphasize is that, assuming the houses would be within their radius, the men articulate a vision of ample work within an unwalled, and in this sense shared, terrain.

Walking through walls In its determined, spreading, multidirectional movement across the land, 9 Star Hotel engages in a practice that resonates with other spatial practices of the militarized region. As Eyal Weizman describes in his writing about urban warfare, the tactic of “walking through walls” was used in the West Bank during “Operation Defensive Shield” as a kind of “inverse geometry” in which soldiers moving through built-up areas would avoid using streets, alleys, and courtyards, and instead pass along by punching holes through the walls, ceilings, and floors of private homes and any other buildings in their path. The Israeli Defense Forces drew on aerial photographs and global positioning systems to plan the movements of the small teams of soldiers who, for their part, would be “saturated within [a town’s] fabric to a degree that they would have been largely invisible from an aerial perspective at any given moment.”30 “The question,” asks Brigidier General Aviv Kochavi, making explicit reference to the influence of postmodernist and post-structuralist theory,31 “is, how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret it as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through or do you interpret it as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation.”32 Keeping in mind this attitude toward space as a fabricated, “inverse geometry” subject to constant interpretation and reinterpretation, I turn now from transverse movement to the vertical axis: the look down on a surface whether flat or dimensional, “real” (as from an airplane) or represented (as on a blueprint or map). In the words of Weizman’s epigraph: “whoever owns the ground, it is from the depth of the earth to the height of the sky.” Google Earth presents a supermap of the region and, as indicated at the start, I have spent many hours flying here and there around the globe noticing things that connect me to facts on the ground: how the shadow of the Eiffel

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Tower stretches horizontally at a certain season and time of day, or that the satellite image of my own neighborhood was at one point out of date, having been taken during the short period of time when our new second story was under construction (discernible from the air as a raw pine-colored square in the midst of my neighbors’ gray-brown roofs). Google Earth has “repurposed decades of satellite imagery to represent the world as a mosaic’ed and navigable domain.” But, as the cultural satellite scholar Lisa Parks is dedicated to showing (the apt phrase just quoted is hers), this imagery comprises not a window on the world nor value-neutral research, but rather a thickly material site of spatial and geopolitical construction in its own right.33 Our critical use of it in conjunction with travels on the ground has the potential, I believe, to contribute to the forging of new and necessary connections among far-flung people and places. Consider the Green Line from the perspective of this sort of de-essentialized cartography. In the area of Modi’in, the Green Line is actually a double line with a no man’s land between. If we turn on the “Borders and Labels” layer of Google Earth, we can see the Line and the region it constructs. We can see, for example, that the curved border formed by the coniferous forest encroaches right across this no man’s land instead of stopping diplomatically at the first marker. And yet, Google Earth in and of itself is blind to the area’s separation fence or wall; first, in that we lose resolution in trying to come close, and second, in that the path of the Wall is not a layer in Google Earth. But it is possible to find the information on a hackers site and import it into “My Places” in Google Earth, thereby revealing all the points where the Wall encroaches over the Line to encompass water resources (such as the wadi seen in the film) and cut off Palestinian villages from ancestral lands and the fingers of new Jewish settlements. Irus Braverman adopts a critical cartography when she takes issue with the purported objectivity of aerial photographs used by the Israeli mapping agency to determine whether land has been cultivated and is thus owned under Article 78 or is uncultivated and available to be claimed.34 I take a lesson from this work to study the locale that is 9 Star Hotel’s core footprint. Were there any Arab villages in this immediate area up until 1948? Historical maps indicate quite a few:35 Barfiliya on the western border of Modi’in; Kharruba, ‘Innaba, and al-Kunnayyisa forming a semi-circle set off a bit further from Modi’in’s western boundary; and al-Burj and Beit Im’in along the Green Line to the east of Modi’in.

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None of these former villages is recognized when typed into Google Earth. The search term elicits a “did you mean” with further suggestions. In a way, their absence from this go-to reference source is understandable since they are no longer inhabited. But if one navigates to the site Palestine Remembered,36 the villages are not only listed but also located (in relation to al-Ramla not Modi’in) and referenced through photographs, written testimonials, information, and videos. It is possible, moreover, to import the information from the hypertextual Palestine Remembered site into Google Earth such that the village names appear suddenly, populating the field of the map where they can now be recognized and made navigable.37 As detail boxes on the site report, 1,647 people from ‘Innaba became refugees in 1948. 12,444 dunums of Arab land were usurped. The area once was irrigated and planted with citrus and olive groves and cereal. The fate: “Partial destruction soon after occupation, and complete destruction in 1952.” Cognizant of both the limits and the benefits of embodied knowledge, I inform Ido that I am coming to Israel, and accept his invitation to trek the byways of 9 Star Hotel. There on site, I point to a rectangular patch of ground hemmed in with stones that I had spotted in the film and searched for via Google Earth imagery. Might it be the remains of a previously planted field? My consumer grade GPS digital camera registers the coordinates of the “9 Star Hotel” where Muchamad, Ahmad, and their compatriots camped in order to work—and from which they were periodically burned out and deported, and removed for good after end of the filming process: 31 degrees North by 34 degrees East (Figure 13.4). From there we are able to confirm this place’s proximity to the village of Barfiliya whose inhabitants in 1948 numbered 847: 31 degrees, 54 minutes, 2.16 seconds North by 34 degrees, 59 minutes, and 15.80 seconds East. It may be that most or all of the campers at the 9 Star Hotel are Palestinians whose families are originally from the West Bank rather than refugees from the areas now encompassed by Israel. In this sense, the life paths of these two constituencies are different and “return” is not literally enacted. And yet, from the perspective of a spatialized trauma study such as I have been advancing, the pre-1948 and current presence of Palestinian people on these same rolling hills may be read as constituting a temporally unsuspended and longitudinally mixed space of remembrance, exertion, and return. The film ends with the encampment being consumed by flames after a raid in which ten men are caught. Muchamad and Ahmad are not among the arrested and we see them and some of the others we have come to know inspecting their

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Figure 13.4 Positioning the “9 Star Hotel.” Photo courtesy of the author.

losses: the red- and blue-colored flames shooting up from a chemical battery; the smell of cooking as their food supplies are burned to a crisp; the sound of crackling as salvaged boards are reduced to ash. “We’re like scavengers; like those who harvest olives after the locusts,” says Muchamad, invoking in the same breath his peoples’ continued connection to this land and the appropriation of its fruits by others.

Tunnel trade38 When Kochavi spoke to Weizman about his method of “walking through” the walls of Palestinian houses, he also used a simile for the soldiers’ advancing motion. It was, he said, “[L]ike a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at

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points and then disappearing.”39 With the earth moving capacities of the worm in mind, I turn now to another area of Palestine and another film. In and around Rafah along the border of Gaza with Egypt there existed a large number of smuggling tunnels. Having proliferated in 2007, at the time of the Blockade of Gaza imposed by Israel with the support of the United States and Egypt and following the election of the Hamas party to the Palestinian government, these tunnels were used for conveying weapons, medicine, food, cigarettes, alcohol, and goods of all kinds. Over 3,000 tunnels were destroyed by Israeli forces, and in late 2009 Egypt began construction of an underground barrier in order to curb their use by smugglers.40 But the “tunnel trade” continued and the tunnels harbored resistance: to the Blockade, to the Israeli military, to the Egyptian policing of their northern Sinai border—to blocage in general as a form of spatial domination. Here too, as with the east to west breaches of the West Bank, we observe another alternate geography—that of going under ground. The news documentary Gaza Tunnels—Israel/Palestine (Journeyman films, March 3, 2008, 18 min. 30 sec.) begins with Said, a 14-year-old boy in a yellow hooded sweatshirt, lowering himself into a tunnel, taking care to avoid the exposed electrical wires. This is one of three tunnels (at the time) of around 700 meters in length that he and other youth had constructed for hire (and which, when completed, were taken over by adults who reap the large profits). A minute or so later we see goods being pulled through the tunnel and then examined and prepared for sale. Elsewhere in this short film we observe rubble in the streets, the remains of homes that have been bombed during fighting and in Israeli’s efforts to destroy the network of tunnels leading from the basements of some of these homes. Like 9 Star Hotel, this film, in its subject matter and in the filming process, exerts resistance against roadblocking or closing off space. Here there is movement—albeit underground—but movement across a border that the strength of nations has failed to seal off completely. Peoples’ paths are expansive—from a home or other digging site in Gaza burrowing onward to the basement of a home in Egypt. Using the full range of the vertical, Said engineers his tunnels with the aid of Google Earth. “I open Google Earth,” he explains to the filmmaker(s) and we see him seated before his computer calling up his neighborhood and that of accomplices in Egypt. In this way, combining contemporary uses of satellite

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imagery and digital technology (like the IDF’s use of infrared sensors to navigate through walls) with “old-fashioned,” laborious digging, Said enacts his resistance “from the depth of the earth to the height of the sky” to the forces that would control ingress and egress from air, land, and sea. As Israel has physically withdrawn from Gaza and portions of the West Bank, the state has sought to control the Palestinians “from beyond the envelopes of their walled-off spaces, and by relying on the strike capacity of the Air Force over Palestinian areas.” Strikingly, Weizman terms this “territorial ‘arrangement’” a “vertical occupation,” one in which “the principle of separation has turned ninety degrees as well, with Israelis and Palestinians separated vertically, occupying different spatial layers.”41 In the West Bank, settlements take the high summits connected by roads raised on bridges over or sometimes blasted through tunnels below Palestinian lands. In the meantime, Palestinian areas are walled in, such that narrow passageways below Israeli multi-laned highways are at times the only way to get from Palestinian place to place. But Weizman points out that Palestinian activists too have recognized the possibilities for surging over and under as well as through Israeli walls and barriers.

Conclusion Since 9 Star Hotel’s production, a double line of electrified fencing has gone up in the area where the groups of workers once passed from their West Bank villages including Za’tara and Yatta into Israel proper and the particular neighborhood of Modi’in under construction. As we stood together above the wadi the workers used to cross with their herds of sheep and commuting back and forth to work (Figure 13.5)—in the shadow of a major concrete installation of separation (Figures 13.6 and 13.7)—Ido Haar drew my attention to the screen of fast-growing trees (Figure 13.8) planted to preserve the forest’s serenity for picnickers, while workers trace longer, even more arduous routes around. By virtue of the privilege of my US passport, I also used the occasion of this visit to tour the West Bank. I saw the narrow, rutted path out of Yatta that now must serve as a bumpy access road since the paved road has been blocked at the junction of road 60. I wondered whether Ahmad now passes along this more painstaking route, surely less frequently but from time to time.

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Figure 13.5 Crossing the wadi; 9 Star Hotel. Film by Ido Haar. Frame enlargement courtesy of Eden Productions Ltd.

In its spatial logic, 9 Star Hotel elasticizes the roadblock genre through its emphasis on mixing, multiple inhabitation, and transference. It stands as an exemplary “crossing film,” alerting us to others in this mode. God Went Surfing with the Devil (Alexander Klein, 2010, United States) is another, recent documentary of this type. Even though the protagonists weren’t allowed to bring surfboards from Israel to Gaza for distribution to locals, people themselves are getting through; there are many “workarounds.” And in fact, I would identify the zealous labor of separation as evidence, precisely, of the opposite: that is, of the vitality of transference and the entropy of exchange. As interdisciplinary academics, we can embrace anti-fundamentalist spatial epistemologies to crack open the struggle for contested territories. As film and television scholars, we can spatialize documentary textual analysis, repurpose navigational modes, and engage in on-site witnessing—triangulating among these methods to allay the hypostatization of place. In this relational manner we might deepen our perception and increase the reality of criss-crossing paths and already mingled lives. Understanding and change may result, I hope, from a critically and self-critically charged combination of lived, mapped, and imagined spaces.

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Figures 13.6 The wadi blocked. Photo courtesy of Steve Nelson.

In “The Right to Refuse: Abject Theory and the Return of Palestinian Refugees,” the Tel Aviv University sociologist Dan Rabinowitz argues that a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must accommodate deeply held Palestinian and Israeli sensibilities and bridge the gap between idealized vision and contemporary reality. Rabinowitz’s plan for change—and I am impressed with his initiative to propose policy shifts from the seat of the academy—involves various forms of

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Figure 13.7 Blocked space. Photo courtesy of Steve Nelson.

tangible redress: allowance for the return of internally displaced Palestinians, restitution and compensation, granting of the right of return for a significant number of the externally displaced, immigration opportunities to countries beyond the Middle East. Also, and of equal importance, according to Rabinowitz, is symbolic redress, including mutual recognition of past and present injustices. “One of the assumptions underwriting notions of transitional justice,” he states with citations to other scholars of this latter field, “is that physical and material issues often represent much deeper cognitive, sentimental, and even spiritual undercurrents. Addressing these currents can diffuse bitterness and other emotional residues and improve the odds of reaching an accord.”42 Calibrating decisions about who and how many are to return to the number of surviving first-generation refugees, Rabinowitz suggests, “could engender significant symbolic resonance and thus become conducive to transitional justice.”43 9 Star Hotel and the other crossing documentaries along with the Google Earth and Palestine Remembered interfaces discussed herein forge creative geographies replete with symbolic significance. By depicting Palestinians and Israelis inhabiting a territory that was and is already—if contentiously and even violently—shared, these imaginative and affecting texts realize an existing transference site that we may seek to consolidate and enlarge.

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Figure 13.8 A screen of trees. Photo courtesy of Steve Nelson.

Notes I am grateful to Ido Haar, internationally acclaimed filmmaker and stellar person, whose film is an inspiration and without whose help the essay’s presentation of a cartographically sensitive textual analysis of documentary could not have been realized. My thanks are also due to Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef for their thoughtful editorial comments; to Linda Dittmar, Greg Eliason, Yoel Elizur, David Gray, Tamar Liebes, Raya Morag, Steve Nelson, Jade Petermon, and Anat Zanger for their knowledge, expertise, and support; and to the conference committees and participants of the Seventh and Eighth Tel Aviv International Colloquia on Cinema and Television. I gratefully acknowledge the funding provided by the University of California for research travel in Israel and the West Bank. 1 Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishing [1969] 1995), 8. Quoted in Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds, Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 6. 2 The idea to build a modern city near two neighborhoods under construction was conceived in the mid-1980s. According to Guy Liberman, The National Planning and Building Council, under Ariel Sharon as housing and construction minister, approved the plan in 1990. “Was Building City of Modi’in A Mistake?” Haaretz.com,

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July 16, 2008. Accessed August 8, 2009. www.haaretz.com/print-edition/business/ was-building-city-of-modi-in-a-mistake-1.249671. I would like to thank Boaz Hagin for encouraging me to overcome my hesitation to speak about these matters in Tel Aviv by generously expressing an eagerness for non-insider points of view and transnational dialogue. The lives of residents and exiles are also affected by the discourses and activities of the numerous inter- and nongovernmental groups and scholars around the world. These include B’Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. For a list of Human Rights and Peace Groups see www.ariga.com/ humanrights/index.shtml and for a list of Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories see www.derechos.org/human-rights/mena/iot.html. Spatial media studies might be seen, genealogically, as descending from the work of Henri Lefebvre, particularly his magisterial The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell [1972] 1991), and, locationally, at the intersection of film and media studies and critical human geography. Relevant recent volumes include Michael Dear, Jim Ketchum, Sarah Luria, and Douglas Richardson, eds, GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (New York and London: Routledge, 2011) and David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, eds, The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). Within film studies, groundbreaking works include Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002) and Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). As will be discussed below, I am adopting Anat Zanger’s use of the term “transference site” in her article “Blind Space: Roadblock Movies in the Contemporary Israeli Film,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 1–12. In this essay I rely on Yi-Fu Tuan’s conception of “space as that which allows movement” while “place is pause.” See, for example, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. Giuliana Bruno’s insight that cinema spectatorship in general is a matter of “site-seeing” is doubly true for site-specific documentaries and perhaps triply true for those of which the premise is physical movement and return. See Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, especially chapter 1, “Site-Seeing: The Cine City.” See also my chapter, “Moving Testimonies: ‘Unhomed Geography’ and the Holocaust Documentary of Return,” in After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, edited by Jakob Lothe, James Phelan, and Susan Suleiman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012).

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9 Borders, Eran Riklis and Nurit Kaydar, 2001; Close, Closed, Closure, Ram Levi, 2002; and Checkpoint, Yoav Shamir, 2003. Zanger, “Blind Space.” 10 See, for example, How I Learned to Overcome My Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997) and Pour un seul de mes deux yeux [Avenge But One of My Two Eyes] (2005) by Avi Mograbi. 11 My use of the word “suspended” is inspired by the topic description of the Eighth Tel Aviv International Colloquium on Cinema and Television Studies, entitled “Suspenseful Times and the Moving Image” (Tel Aviv University, June 8–10, 2010). 12 Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, chapter 6, “A Dead-End: Roadblock Movies,” Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 153. In “The Palestinian Road (Block) Movie” (including Route 181 [Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, 2003], 25 Kilometers [Nahed Awwad, 2004], or Road Map [Multiplicity, 2003]), Kay Dickinson adopts a similar critical perspective. “It would be impossible to claim that these forms of fractured and partial access to a ‘home culture’ should be celebrated without a sense of the pain they also affect” (142), she writes. Yet she suggests, as well, that “the tenacity with which these situations are dealt and the communicative gestures they afford are critical to the creative and egalitarian road-building process to which so many filmmakers and critics aspire” (142). In Cinema at the Periphery, edited by Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010). 13 For exemplary works of critical human geography from a de-essentialized perspective see Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) and Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). 14 Janet Walker, “Moving Testimonies and the Geography of Suffering: Perils and Fantasies of Belonging after Katrina,” Continuum 24, no. 1 (February 2010): 47–64. Reprinted in Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media, edited by Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). 15 Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8–9. See also Caruth’s monograph, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 16 Phrases and sentences in this paragraph are drawn from my article, Walker, “Moving Testimonies.” 17 Rogoff, Terra Infirma, 110. 18 Some of this information about what happened to Ahmad was shared with me by filmmaker Ido Haar. The film itself does show the end of a telephone conversation

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in which the guy with the phone reports to the others that, while they are camping on the hillside, Ahmad is lying in bed. Here I am borrowing and paraphrasing Hayden White’s explanation of “tropics” as “the process by which all discourse constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyze objectively.” Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 2. The initial Skype conversations, each over an hour in length, took place on January 21 and 29, 2010. As indicated, Ido Haar himself created the map prototypes. The finished versions were realized for me by Greg Eliason. For a discussion of this scholar/filmmaker collaborative working process see “Mapping Documentary: Roundtable with Filmmaker Ido Haar and Film and Media Studies Scholar Janet Walker in Conversation with David Gray and Jade Petermon,” Media Fields: Critical Explorations in Space and Media, issue 3, edited by Ryan Bowles and Rahul Mukherjee (2011), www.mediafieldsjournal.org/mapping-documentary/2011/8/21/ mapping-documentary-roundtable-with-filmmaker-ido-haar-and-f.html. Rogoff, Terra Infirma, 21. Ibid., 3. W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power, second edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5. Irus Braverman, “ ‘The Tree Is the Enemy Soldier’: A Sociological Making of War Landscapes in the Occupied West Bank,” Law & Society Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 452, 461. The swamp-clearing function of tree-planting is well known. The eucalyptus trees planted in the Hula Valley were well suited to this purpose. See Carol B. Bardenstein, “Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory,” in Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 158. See also Braverman, “The Tree,” 450. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995), 5–6. Braverman, “The Tree,” 461. See the Zochrot website. In a continuation of the practice, Canada Park was planted mostly in the West Bank over the ruins of the Palestinian villages of Yalu and Imwas that were depopulated in 1967 during the Six-Day War. See Yuval Yoaz, “The Palestinian Past of Canada Park is Forgotten in JNF Signs,” translated by Talia Fried, Haaretz, June 12, 2005. www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=210. Accessed January 19, 2011. Standing over the ruins of houses and millstones and the remains of olive orchards, the trees are, in the words of Carol Bardenstein, “an act of erasure of Palestinian memory” (“Trees, Forests,” 164).

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29 I am grateful to Linda Dittmar who introduced me to Zochrot and invited me to join the group’s visit to Khirbat al-Lawz in June of 2008. 30 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London and New York: Verso), 186. 31 Brigadier Generals Aviv Kochavi and Shiman Naveh both, the latter having retired from the military to codirect the Operational Theory Research Institute from 1996–2006, have drawn on critical theory to explain military maneuvers. But Eyal Weizman is skeptical of the extent to which such military tactics are in fact drawn from the work of left-wing radical humanities scholars and artists. As he asserts wryly, supported by historical research, “the Israeli military hardly needed Deleuze to attack Nablus.” Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land, 214. 32 Weizman, Hollow Land, 198. 33 Lisa Parks, “Between Orbit and the Ground. Conflict Monitoring, Google Earth and the ‘Crisis in Darfur’ Project,” in Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 246. See also Lisa Parks’s book, Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 34 The mapping agency is called Survey of Israel: Agency for Geodesy, Cadastre, Mapping and Geographic Information and the Land Appeal Committee. Malka Offri, the person whose job it is to read the photos—through zoom-transfer, double-photo, and stereoscopic processes—insisted to Braverman that “the use of aerial photos . . . promotes a regime of truth” and insisted as well on the accuracy and impartiality of her work (“The Tree,” 468). 35 “Map of Palestine 1948: Depopulated Villages and Towns Compared with Map 2008.” Bethlehem, West Bank: PalMap Palestine Mapping Center, 2008. www. palmap.org. 36 www.palestineremembered.com/. Accessed May 19, 2010. My understanding of this history is deeply informed by the stunning volume edited by Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, Nakba. 37 My practice here is one of importing these alternate sites into the “My Places” section of Google Earth. I am not, in this case, acting as a volunteer geographer petitioning Google to have this additional information officially included. 38 I borrow this section title from the film Tunnel Trade, by Laila El-Haddad and Saeed Taji Farouky, Gaza, 2007. 39 Weizman, Hollow Land, 199. 40 See “Gaza Strip Smuggling Tunnels,” Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Gaza_Strip_smuggling_tunnels. Accessed November 19, 2011. Egypt now allows Palestinians to enter Egypt from Gaza at the Rafah cross. See “Egypt Gaza Border Reopened Permanently.” May 28, 2011. Huffington Post World. www.huffingtonpost.

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com/2011/05/28/egypt-gaza-border-reopened_n_868390.html. Accessed November 19, 2011. 41 Weizman, Hollow Land, 11. 42 Dan Rabinowitz, “The Right to Refuse: Abject Theory and the Return of Palestinian Refugees,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 507. 43 Rabinowitz, “Right to Refuse,” 515.

Bibliography Bardenstein, Carol B. “Trees, Forests, and the Shaping of Palestinian and Israeli Collective Memory.” In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, 148–68. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999. Bodenhamer, David J., John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, eds. The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Braverman, Irus. “ ‘The Tree Is the Enemy Soldier’: A Sociological Making of War Landscapes in the Occupied West Bank.” Law & Society Review 42, no. 3 (2008): 449–82. Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso, 2002. Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Dear, Michael, Jim Ketchum, Sarah Luria, and Douglas Richardson, eds. GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place. New York and London: Routledge, 2011. Dickinson, Kay. “The Palestinian Road (Block) Movie: Everyday Geographies of Second Intifada Filmmaking.” In Cinema at the Periphery, edited by Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal, 137–55. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010. Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Gertz, Nurith and George Khleifi. “A Dead-End: Roadblock Movies.” In Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory, 134–70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1969. History: The Last Things before the Last. Princeton: Marcus Wiener Publishing, 1995. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. 1972. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1991.

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Mapping Documentary: Roundtable with Filmmaker Ido Haar and Film and Media Studies Scholar Janet Walker in Conversation with David Gray and Jade Petermon.” Media Fields: Critical Explorations in Space and Media, no. 3 (2011). www. mediafieldsjournal.org/mapping-documentary/2011/8/21/mapping-documentaryroundtable-with-filmmaker-ido-haar-and-f.html. Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Mitchell, W. J. T. Landscape and Power. Second edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Parks, Lisa. “Between Orbit and the Ground. Conflict Monitoring, Google Earth and the ‘Crisis in Darfur’ Project.” In Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, edited by Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker, 245–67. London and New York: Routledge, 2010. —. Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Rabinowitz, Dan. “The Right to Refuse: Abject Theory and the Return of Palestinian Refugees.” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 496–516. Rogoff, Irit. Terra Infirma. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Sa’di, Ahmad H. and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds. Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage, 1995. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Walker, Janet. “Moving Testimonies and the Geography of Suffering: Perils and Fantasies of Belonging after Katrina.” Continuum 24, no. 1 (February 2010): 47–64. Reprinted in Interrogating Trauma: Collective Suffering in Global Arts and Media, edited by Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso, 47–64. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. —. “Moving Testimonies: ‘Unhomed Geography’ and the Holocaust Documentary of Return.” In After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future, edited by Jakob Lothe, James Phelan, and Susan Suleiman, 269–88. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation. London and New York: Verso. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Zanger, Anat. “Blind Space: Roadblock Movies in the Contemporary Israeli Film.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 24, no. 1 (2005): 1–12.

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Shmulik Duvdevani teaches at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, the Kibbutzim College of Education, Technology and Arts, and Sam Spiegel Film School, Jerusalem. He is a scholar of Israeli cinema and documentaries. His book First Person, Camera (Keter Publishing, 2010, in Hebrew) deals with Israeli personal documentaries, “I-movies.” Nerit Grossman has a PhD degree from the Law Faculty at Bar-Ilan University, Israel, in the field of film and law. She has an LLB with honors in law and philosophy, and LLMin law as part of the honors program, Bar-Ilan University. She has studied screenwriting at the Ma’aleh School of television, Film and the Arts and is recipient of the President’s Scholarship and Schuph Scholarship from Bar-Ilan University. She was a law clerk in the district court in Tel Aviv, and is currently teaching at Bar-Ilan University and Tel Aviv University. Nurith Gertz is Professor Emerita of Hebrew literature and film at The Open University of Israel. She has served as head of the theoretical studies at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, and currently heads the Department of Culture Creation and Production at Sapir College. Among her recent books, Captive of a Dream: National Myths in Israeli Culture (Vallentine Mitchell, 2000); Holocaust Survivors, Aliens and Others in Israeli Cinema (Am Oved, 2004, in Hebrew); Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma and Memory, with George Khleifi (Edinburgh University Press and Indiana University Press, 2008); and Unrepentant (Am Oved, 2009, in Hebrew). Boaz Hagin is Lecturer at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. He is author of Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), co-editor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), and co-author with Thomas Elsaesser of Memory, Trauma, and Fantasy in American Cinema (Open University of Israel, 2012, in Hebrew). Gal Hermoni is a PhD student at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, where he teaches film theory and film sound. He has published

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articles and book chapters about Israeli cinema and Israeli culture. His research interests include film theory, sound studies, cultural and critical theories, phenomenology, semiotics, and popular music. He is also a professional musician who has released, produced, and played in several musical projects in the Israeli alternative music scene. Raya Morag is Associate Professor of cinema studies at the Department of Communication & Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research and publications deal with the New German Cinema; Vietnam War movies; cinema, war, and masculinity; post-traumatic cinema; trauma and ethics; perpetrator trauma; documentary cinema; and corporeal-feminist film critique. Her current research focuses on Israeli and Palestinian post-traumatic cinema on the second Intifada. She is the author of Defeated Masculinity: Post-Traumatic Cinema in the Aftermath of War (Peter Lang, 2009) and The Defeated Male. Cinema, Trauma, War (Resling 2011, in Hebrew). Her book Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema is forthcoming (I.B. Tauris, 2013). Yael Munk is Lecturer of film and cultural studies at the Open University of Israel. She is the author of Exiled in Their Borders: Israeli Cinema between Two Intifadas (The Open University of Israel, 2012). In her research she explores Israeli and Palestinian cinemas, postcolonial theory and the critique of colonialism, the emergence of new and hybrid identities after the nation-state, and documentary filmmaking by women. Judd Ne’eman is Laureate of the 2009 Israel Prize for cinema, and emeritus professor at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University, which he has chaired several times. He has produced and directed feature films and documentaries for cinema and television. Among his films: The Dress (1970), Paratroopers (1977), Seamen’s Strike (1981), Streets of Yesterday (1989), and Nuzhat Al-Fuad (2007). He has published articles and edited books on Israeli cinema and war films. He was a visiting professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and a fellow at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at The University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is currently developing a war movie on the 1973 Kippur war. Ella Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University. Her books include: Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices; Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age (Duke University Press, 2006); Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (I.B. Tauris, 2010); Le sionisme du

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point de vue de ses victimes juives: les juifs orientaux en Israel (La Fabrique, 2006); and with Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism (Routledge, 1994); Flagging Patriotism: Crises of Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006); and Race in Translation: Culture Wars Around the Postcolonial Atlantic (NYU Press, 2012). Shohat’s work has been translated into diverse languages, including: Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, German, and Italian. Shohat wrote the postscript to the Hebrew translation of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. She has also served on the editorial board of several journals, including: Social Text; Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies; Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism; Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; and Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication. Some of her Social Text co-edited special issues include: “Palestine in a Transnational Context” (2003) and “Edward Said: A Memorial Issue” (2006). Shohat is a recipient of a number of fellowships: Rockefeller Bellagio Residency; Fulbright research/lectureship at the University of São Paulo; and the Society for the Humanities, Cornell University, where she also taught at The School of Criticism and Theory. Diane Waldman teaches in the Media, Film, and Journalism department and the Gender and Women’s Studies program at the University of Denver. She is the co-editor (with Janet Walker) of Feminism and Documentary (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); the author of various essays on feminism and film history, film and social history, and popular culture and the law; and a member of the advisory board of Studies in Documentary Film. Janet Walker is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is also affiliated with the Feminist Studies and Comparative Literature Programs and co-convenor of the Environmental Media Initiative Research Group of the Carsey-Wolf Center. Her most recent books are Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (University of California Press, 2005) and Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering (co-edited with Bhaskar Sarkar, Routledge, 2010), and she directs the ongoing Video Portraits of Survival project to create audiovisual materials with students and local residents who are survivors and upstanders of the Holocaust. Currently, she is involved with an interdisciplinary initiative concerning figurations of sea-level rise and writing a book about documentary, space, and environment. Raz Yosef is Senior Lecturer and the chair of the cinema studies BA Program at the Department of Film and Television, Tel Aviv University. He was a visiting

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professor at the University of Michigan and Columbia University. Yosef is the author of Beyond Flesh: Queer Masculinities and Nationalism in Israeli Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2004), To Know a Man: Masculinity, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Israeli Cinema (Hakibbutz Hamuchad, 2010, in Hebrew), The Politics of Loss and Trauma in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Routledge, 2011), and co-editor of Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). His work on gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationalism in Israeli visual culture has appeared in GLQ, Third Text, Framework, Shofar, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Camera Obscura, and Cinema Journal. Yosef is a recipient of the 2010–13 Israel Science Foundation fellowship for his project on trauma and memory in contemporary Israeli cinema. Anat Zanger is Associate Professor at the Department of Film and Television and chair of the MA in Film Studies at Tel Aviv University. Among her research subjects: Israeli cinema, mythology, collective memory, intertextuality, space and landscape. She is the author of Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguises (Amsterdam University Press, 2006) and Place, Memory and Myth in Contemporary Israeli Cinema (Valentine Mitchell, 2012). Her project on Israeli space and cinema has received a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation (2008–12). Yael Zerubavel is the Founding Director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life and Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Rutgers University. She has published extensively in the area of Israeli collective memory and national identity; Israeli myths, symbols, and rituals; autobiographical memory; war and trauma; land and space in Israeli culture; Israeli literature and film. Her book Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1995) won the 1996 Salo Baron Prize of the American Academy for Jewish Research. Zerubavel is currently completing a book manuscript Desert in the Promised Land: Nationalism, Politics, and Symbolic Landscapes (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming) and is working on another book-manuscript on Biblical Images and the Performance of Antiquity in Contemporary Israel. She has been a frequent speaker in international conferences in memory studies and has lectured widely to academic and public audiences in the United States, Israel, and Europe and has served on the boards of the Associations for Jewish Studies and Israel Studies and is on the editorial boards of key academic journals and presses in the fields of Israel and Jewish Studies.

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Index

Page numbers in bold refer to figures. 100 Years of Mizrahi Writing 46 6 Open, 21 Closed 35, 43 66 Was a Good Year for Tourism 33 9 Star Hotel 330–5, 335, 336–46, 347, 349 Abergel, Reuven 24, 44 Abergil, Eden 51 Abikasis, Meital 35 abjection 182, 277–9, 281, 290 Aboutbul, Ovad 24 Abu Ghraib 9, 51–4, 58–9, 61 photos 52–3 see also England; Harman Abu-Wael, Tawfik 167, 172–5, 190–1 accountability 94–6, 98, 100–7, 110–12 Bernasconi on 100 acting out 7–8, 134, 189, 191, 225, 229, 230–4, 244 Agamben, Giorgio 269, 273–4, 279, 282 aidos 266–7 see also Cairns Akeda see Binding Myth Alcalay, Ammiel 46 After Jews and Arabs: Remaking Levantine Culture 46 Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing 46 Aliya (ascendancy) 23, 28, 42 see also displacement All Men are Equal—But Some Are More 43 Aloni, Udi 245 Amar, Ronen 35 Amenábar, Alejandro 208 American Psycho 204 Ami, Ben 24 Amir, Yigal 148 Anderson, Benedict 118–19 Ankri, Serge 32 Arab nationalism 22, 29

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Arab-Jew, the 21–9 Arab-Muslim culture 21 Arabness 22, 28, 30–1, 47 Arad, Avi 211 Arafat, Yasser 25 archive, the 7, 10, 43, 73, 125–6, 133–40 archive desire 139 Arendt, Hannah 100 Armistice Agreement Line 329 see also Green Line Assassin Next Door, The 199 Avanti Popolo 242, 302, 313–17, 319, 320 antiwar message in 317 awards won 317 dark humor and irony in, use of 317 role of desert in 314 two domains of struggle, the 315 Avatar 210 Aviad, Michal 96 Axelrod, Nathan 4–5 Azoulay, Hana 37 Ballas, Shimon 27, 32 Outcast 27 Banai, Sigalit 32 Bar David, Sini 32–3 Barak, Ehud 127 Barbash, Uri 267 Barthes, Roland 75, 85, 95, 107–9, 156 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography 85 Sur Racine 107 Baruch, Adam 150, 158 Barzent Roofs 25, 35 Basson, Assaf 35 Baudelaire, Charles 79 Baudry, Jean-Louis 77

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362 Beaufort 10, 121–2, 124, 126–7, 128–30, 128–40, 140–1 archival desire in, protagonist’s 126 heterotopic spaces in 129–30 memory in 126 trauma in 127, 132, 134–40 Because of That War 234–6 Becket, Samuel 314 Begin, Menachem 117, 122 Behar, Moshe 45 Beit-Zvi, Shabtai 265 belatedness 120, 332 see also trauma Belhassen, David 23, 40 Bellour, Raymond 76 Ben Simhon, Gavriel 36 Ben-Ami, Shlomo Benchetrit, David 23, 32, 39, 42–3 Ben-Dor, Orna 234 Ben-Dor, Zvi 46 Ben-Gurion, David 307, 337 Benigni, Roberto 263–4 Benjamin, Walter 10, 104, 110 Ben-Ner, Yitzhak 243 Winter Games 243 Bernasconi, Robert 100 Bernstein, Assaf 199 Bettelheim, Bruno 282 Between Two Notes 30 Bhabha, Homi K. 179–80, 191 Biba 73 Bilu, Vardit 242 Binding Myth, the 11, 149–52, 154–7, 159–60 Biram 331 Birth of a Prophecy, The 229 Bitton, Charlie 44 Bitton, Erez 24, 36 Bitton, Simone 32, 39, 45 Bitton, Yael 33 Black Panther rebellion (1970s) 43 Black Panthers, The 39, 44 Blade Runner 75 Blazing Sands 301, 311–13, 318 as anti-Israeli 312 border-crossing in 312 melodramatic orientation 311 and Scouting Patrol 312 weaknesses 311

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Index blocked space 167, 331, 348–9 Bloom, Harold 208–9 Blow Up 75 body 27, 30, 46, 53–4, 94, 110, 118–21, 137–8, 160, 167, 173–4, 177, 182–3, 186–8, 192, 205, 269, 273–4, 279, 284, 290, 315–16 Mirazhi body 31, 46 border 4, 22–3, 26–7, 33, 47, 127, 130, 178, 244, 304, 308–9, 311, 330, 332, 340, 342, 345 border-crossings 168, 308–9, 312–13 see also Blazing Sands; Scouting Patrol borderline 97 Bordwell, David 203 see also intensified continuity Braun, Netalie 167, 176, 184–5 Braverman, Irus 336–7, 342 Breaking the Silence 51, 57, 58, 66, 67 Browning, Tod 212 Bubble, The 167–8, 176–7, 178, 178–85, 187, 189–93 denial of the Occupation through gay-ization 178, 182 and Diary of a Male Whore 179 opening reversals 177 passing 178 sexual 178 spatial 178 Bukai, Raffi 242, 302, 313–14 Buried But Alive 43–4 Burning Mooki 279–83, 288–90 fetish in 281 Holocaust, traces of the 279–83 post-traumatic guilt in 282 sexuality and the Holocaust 280–1 Butler, Judith 54, 61–2 Buzaglo, Haim 123 Café Noah 32 Cage, The 153 Cairns, Douglas L. 266–7, 286 Cameron, James 210 Campbell Soup series 79 Caputo, John D. 135 Carroll, John 267 Caruth, Cathy 5–6, 120, 332

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Index Cast a Giant Shadow 307 Caught 208 Cedar, Joseph 121 Chalrie Baghdad 32 checkpoint 177, 179–83, 330–3 Cherry Season, The 123 Chetrit, Sami Shalom 24, 39, 44, 46 Children of the Exodus 230–1 Choice and Destiny 233, 235–6, 239 Choukri, Mohamed 175–6 For Bread Alone 175 Jean Genet in Tangier 175 Cinema Egypt 32 Close to Home 242 Clouds over Israel 4 Cohen, Eli 123 Cohen, Leonard 154 collective consciousness 125, 225 collective memory 4, 7, 11, 37, 82, 102–4, 126, 148–50, 153, 155–6, 158, 160, 199, 241, 299, 318 Israeli 13, 148–50, 199 Jewish 199 see also memory collective trauma 7, 212 Erikson’s definition of 7 colonialism 1, 184–5 French 175 Crary, Jonathan 78 Techniques of the Observer 78 Creed, Barbara 169, 171 Crooklyn 36 crossing film see Blazing Sands; Scouting Patrol Crowe, Cameron 204 Cukor, George 207 Cup Final 123, 242 Cut 25–6 see also Field Diary Dadon-Spigel, Yochi 32, 45 Damari, Shoshana 304 Darwish, Mahmoud 112 “Identity of Absence” 112 Dayan, Assi 11, 148–60 Dayan, Moshe 148 de Certeau, Michel 80 de Lauretis, Teresa 192 de Man, Paul 55 De Palma, Brian 203, 208

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death drive, the 134–5, 139 Debord, Guy 78 Debt, The 199, 274–9, 283, 289–90 motif of the double, the 275–6 myth of substitution, the 278 and Walk on Water 278 deferred action (Nachträglichkeit ) 6, 120–1, 170 Deleuze, Gilles 78, 238 Der‘i, Arieh 24 Derrida, Jacques 134–5, 139, 271, 284 Archive Fever 134 desert, the 13, 23, 28, 299–320, 337 death in 313–17 as empty space 314 and the Settlement 301–2 as a symbolic landscape 301 Desperado Square 36–8 Desperate Steps 38 Diary (Perlov’s) 74, 76 Diary of a Male Whore 167, 168–77, 170, 181, 189–93 infantile voyeurism in 170 interracial relations in 169 masturbation as post-traumatic repetitious behavior in 174–5 Occupation, the 168 post-traumatic memory as bi-directional 173 primal scene in, the 170–1 sexuality as post-traumatic 169, 171 traumatic Palestinian male pleasure in 174 vagina dentata, the 169–70, 172–3 displacement 22, 27, 31, 34, 124 see also Mizrahi cinema terms used to designate 23 disremembering 121 Doane, Mary Ann 82 double, the (doppelganger) 214–15, 275–6 Down a One Way Road 40 Dr. Pomerantz 148, 153, 159–60 Binding Myth in, correction of the 159–60 Sabra in, demystification of the 159 Dracula 212 Dragonwyck 207 Dressed to Kill 208

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364

Index

Dror, Duki 31–2, 35 Dunner, Lazar 228 East for Peace 36 Ebin, David 230 Edelman, Lee 188 Eichmann Trial, the 230, 275 Electric Blanket Named Moshe, An 148, 152–3 fantasies of the protagonists 155–6 motif of the father’s death 156 patricide in 156 Eli Hamo 36, 39, 44 Eliade, Mircea 273 Elkayam, Shelly 36 Elon, Danae 25, 96 Elsaesser, Thomas 6, 205, 209–11, 224 Empire Strikes Back, The 212 England, Lynndie 52 see also Abu Ghraib; Harman enlightened occupation 177 Erikson, Kai 7 Exile 32 Exodus 306–7 Exodus, the 23, 25, 33, 300, 309, 318 Biblical 28, 33, 300, 303, 314 Iraqi 25 modern 302–6, 318 Palestinian 23 Yemenite Jewish 305 Experiment Perilous 207 Fact 40 Fanon, Frantz 38, 190–1 Black Skin, White Masks 38 fantasmatic mirror-images 193 fantasy 8, 59, 121–3, 137, 155–6, 159, 169, 170–2, 174–6, 178, 181, 183–4, 188–9, 191, 193, 268, 336 futuristic 155 gay 178 phylogenetic 8 post-traumatic 168, 190 primal scene fantasy 170, 172–3 and scenic quality 172 spatial 178, 181 traumatic 172

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of vagina dentate 171, 173 voyeuristic 171 Father Language 32 Feldman, Yael 149–50 Fellini, Federico 287 Felman, Shoshana 6 female gothic films 207 festivals see film festivals fictional documentary, Avi Mograbi’s 10 Field Diary 26 Fight Club 204 film festivals 46, 52, 185, 209–11 Berlin International Film Festival 122 Fincher, David 204, 211 Fink, Ida 283 First Lebanon War 117, 123–4, 236, 243 Fisher, David 43 flâneur 10, 74, 79–80, 89 Florentin 182 Folman, Ari 122, 236, 242 Forget Baghdad 27, 30 forgetting 7, 110, 121, 134–6, 139, 242, 245, 248 see also memory Forgiveness 245 Foucault, Michel 104, 129 Fox, Eytan 167, 176, 179, 181, 186, 190 Fragments 123 Frankenstein 212 Frege, Gottlob 264 Freud, Sigmund 6–7, 134, 170–2, 206, 209, 223–4, 233–4 Frisch, Larry 301, 306 “From a Dark Angle” 45 Frozen Days 199–215, 201, 204, 208 fragmentary and repetitive character of 201 influence of non-Israeli filmmakers on 203 as a mind-game film 205–7 supernatural in, the 201–2 Gal, Meir 45 Game, The 204 Gaslight 207 Gavison, Savi 153 Gay International 178–9 gay-ization 178–80, 182, 191, 193

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Index Gaza Tunnels—Israel/Palestine 345 and 9 Star Hotel 345 Genet, Jean 175 Thief ’s Journal, The 175 George Ovadia: Merchant of Feelings 38 Gerstel, Yuli Cohen 96 Gertz, Nurith 123, 330 Gevald 167–8, 176, 184–5, 186, 186–93 and The Bubble 189 kinging in 187 Ghosts of Abu Ghraib 52–4, 58–9 Gibney, Alex 52 Gifted 32, 45 Gilmore, Inigo 27, 30, 98 Ginsberg, Elaine K. 179 Gitai, Amos 26, 236, 240, 243 God Went Surfing with the Devil 347 Godfrey, Peter 208 Gole Sangam 32 Google Earth 13, 329–30, 341–3, 345, 349 Goren, Amit 33, 35, 43, 96, 153 gothic see female gothic films Gover, Yerach 46 Zionism . . . 46 Green Line, the 329, 334, 342 see also Armistice Agreement Line Greenberg, Adam 211 Grosz, Elizabeth 183 Guerin, Frances 56 Image and the Witness . . ., The (with Hallas) 56 Gunning, Tom 79 Gurevitz, Zeli 82 Guttari, Félix 238 Haar, Ido 330, 338, 340, 346 Haaretz 58 Habib, Nuri 301, 304–5 Hagar, Dalia 242 Hagin, Boaz 272 Halawani, Mary 33 Halberstam, Judith 182, 186 Halbwachs, Maurice 299 Halfon, Eyal 32 Hallas, Roger 56 Image and the Witness . . ., The (with Guerin) 56

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Hamara 35, 39 Hanegbi, Haim 44 HaPaamon 36 Hapatish 36 Happy Birthday, Mr. Mograbi 93–113 accountability, avoidance of 100–4 character’s double status 96–100 as docu-fiction 99, 102 three plots of 93–4, 97 as Zionist discourse of victimhood 104–6 Harman, Sabrina 52 see also Abu Ghraib; England Harron, Mary 204 Hasfari, Shmuel 37 Hassan, Nizar 25–6 Have You Heard About the Black Panthers? 43–4 Have You Heard About the Panthers, Mr. Moshe? 44 Haymian, Sarit 32 He Walked through the Fields 11, 118–19, 148, 152–3, 158 Heller, Ayelet 39 Hemias, Asher 23, 40 heterotopia 129–30 heroic death 150 Hezbollah 127, 136 Higson, Andrew 205 Hila News 36 Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer 3, 307 Hirsch, Marianne 8 see also postmemory history-memory 125 Hitchcock, Alfred 203, 207–9 Hitler, Adolf 264 Hochberg, Gil 46 In Spite of Partition 46 Hole in the Moon 319 Holocaust, the 1, 3–4, 6, 12, 24, 57, 84, 86, 112, 263–91 and Israeli cinema 223–41 1940s and 1950s, the 226–30 1960s and 1970s, the 230–2 1980s–90s, the 232–6 2000s, the 236–41 Holocaust studies 230

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366

Index

Homage by Assassination 30 Home 38 Homecoming 227 Hope, The 301, 318 desert, biblical role of 301, 303 and the Exodus paradigm 302–6 I Miss the Sun 33 I Walked with a Zombie 207 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs 210 identification 58, 111, 174, 190, 201 identity 5, 12, 21–2, 29, 33, 36, 38, 43, 45, 79, 94–5, 105–6, 109–10, 119, 125–6, 133, 136, 148, 167, 171, 176, 179, 181, 188, 192, 200–1, 203, 205–6, 208, 213–15, 223, 225–6, 228, 237, 239, 247–8, 271–3, 283, 302–3 Arab 37 fantasmatic 178 Israeli 28, 148, 152 Jewish 8, 34, 289 Judeo-Arab 21 lived 7 Mizrahi 29, 32, 34–5, 37, 46 Palestinian 104 post-traumatic 190 Immigrants 228 In Jerusalem 73 In Thy Blood Live 74 Inglorious Basterds 263–4, 268 intensified continuity 203 interracial sex 167–8, 172, 183, 191 Intifada 25, 107–9, 155, 169, 180, 192 see also Second Intifada Israel: A Land of Miracles 229 Israeli bereavement myth 192 Israeli Defense Force (IDF) 57–8, 60, 104, 113, 117–18, 122–3, 126–7, 131–3, 136, 309, 341, 346 Iton Aher 36 Jewish National Fund, the 337–8 Jewishness 21–2, 24, 29–30, 47, 286 see also Arabness Jew-ization 180, 192 Judaism 22, 247, 288 Jung, Carl 277

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Kaddim Wind: Moroccan Chronicles 23–4, 32, 39, 43 Kaes, Anton 73 Kafka, Franz 269 Trial, The 269 Kahana, Jonathan 55 Kahlili, Ron 35 Kaplan, E. Ann 6 Kapoor, Raj 37 Kazantzakis, Nikos 291 Kedar, Nurit 117, 120–1 Kedma, as a road-movie 237 trauma in 236–41 Kenan, Amos 243 Block 23, 243 Kennedy, Rory 52 Kershner, Irvin 212 Khirbet Khizeh 241–8 Khleifi, George 330 Kimchi, Rami 32 Kippur 243–4 Klein, Alexander 347 Kochavi, Aviv 341, 344 Kristeva, Julia 281 Krumgold, Joseph 227 La Dolce Vita 287 La jetée 75–7 La Operacion 41 LaCapra, Dominick 8 Lamarckism 8 Landscape and Memory 337 Lang, Fritz 207 Lanzmann, Claude 84, 291 Laplanche, Jean 172–3 Fantasme Originaire (with Pontalis) 172 Laqueur, Thomas W. 174 Last Jews of Babylon, The 27–8, 30 and Aliya 28 latency 6–7, 223, 233–4, 246, 248 Laub, Dori 6 Lavie, Smadar 46 Lebanese swamp, the 118 Lebanon 122, 124, 243 Lee, Spike 36 Lefebvre, Henri 301, 334, 336 Leibowitz, Yeshayahu 272–3

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Index Leila the Village Girl 32 Lemel, Yossi 2 “Anatomy of a Conflict” 2 Lerner, Danny 199, 202–4, 207–9, 211–12, 214–15 Lesage, Julia 55 Leshem, Ron 122 If There is a Heaven 122 Levi, Tikva 45 Lévinas, Emmanuel 248, 273, 285 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 100 Leys, Ruth 266, 282, 284–5 Life according to Agfa 148, 152–5 carnage scene, the 154–5 Life is Beautiful 263–4 “living-dead” soldier 118, 131, 133 Loevy, Ram 242–3 loss 10–11, 24, 33–4, 40, 95, 110–12, 124, 126–7, 131, 140, 168, 180, 183, 190–1, 225, 269–70, 278 Love Song, A 175 Lucas, George 212 Ma‘abarot 39 Mackey, Robert 52 Made in Israel 268–70, 275, 283, 285, 289–90 Holocaust, traces of the 269–70 Nazism in 268–70 Madmoni-Gerber, Shoshana 46 Maktub Aleik. . . 35 Mama Faiza 32–3 Mama’s Couscous 32 Mankiewicz, Joseph L. 207 Maoz, Shmuel 122, 243 map(s) (and mapping) 23, 28, 82, 330, 332–5, 335, 336 Marker, Chris 75 Martziano, Sa‘adia 44 Marx, Karl 263 Massad, Joseph 178–9, 184 Desiring Arabs 178 masturbation 11, 169, 172, 174–6, 193 components of 174 Matchmaker, The 199 materiality 118, 174 Matter of Size, A 199

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Maymon, Sharon 199 Medusa myth, the 174 Megged, Aharon 312 Meir, Golda 25, 44 melancholia 12, 267, 291 Memento 75 Memories of the Eichmann Trial 74, 83–6 memory of the image in 84–5 memory 1–3, 5–6, 8–13, 21, 23, 29–30, 34, 38, 47, 57, 62, 78, 82–3, 110, 119–20, 121, 124–6, 133–6, 139–40, 167, 170, 172–3, 199, 206, 223, 228–9, 231–2, 234–6, 240, 242, 244, 265–6, 268, 271–2, 281, 283, 290, 299–302, 306–8, 312–13, 318–20 collective 4, 7, 11, 37, 82, 102–4, 126, 148–50, 153, 155–6, 158, 160, 199, 241, 299, 318 as a duty 125 historical 29, 124–6, 133, 136, 273–4 private 125 sexual 171 sites of 13, 125–6, 300–1, 318 traumatic 121–2, 224 Messika, Yamin 36, 38 Michael, Sami 27, 32, 38, 43 All Men are Equal—But Some Are More 38 Handful of Fog, A 27 Michelson, Annette 80 Milchan, Arnon 211 Millo, Yosef 118, 148, 150–2 mimicry 179–80 mind-game films 12, 204–8, 214–15 see also Frozen Days Minnelli, Vincent 207 Mitchell, W. J. T. 336 Mizrahi 9, 25–6, 37 body 31, 46 consciousness 35 fanaticism 26 identity 29, 32, 34 intellectuals/artists 37 leftist movements 45 space 35 struggle 43–5

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368

Index

Mizrahi cinema 9, 29–39, 46 Arab-Jew in, the 29–30 Bourekas cinema 36, 38 displacement in 29–39 and Mizrahi literature 31 Revisionist 39–47 Mizrahi culture 9, 29–32, 34, 36, 39, 43 Mizrahi music 35 Mizrahi poetry 46 Mizrahi studies 47 Mizrahi, Togo 32 Mizrahim 9, 21, 26, 28, 29–31, 34–7, 39, 43–7 as imagined community 29 Mograbi, Avi 10, 93 Monet, Claude 79 Morag, Raya 52, 56, 60 Morris, Errol 52, 55 Moshenson, Ilan 245 Mossek, Nissim 43–4 “Mother Tongue” 46 Mourad, Leila 32 mourning 12, 40, 230, 267, 291 Mr. Baum 148, 152–3 motif of the father’s death in, the 157 Sabra myth, failure of the 158 Mulvey, Laura 77 Murnau, Friedrich Wilhelm 212 My Family’s Pizza 35 My Fantasia 31–2, 35 My Stills 73–83, 86 aesthetic of delayed cinema, the 77–80 dynamic between the stills and the moving pictures 75–7 event in, the 82–3 passage in, the 80–2 Nakba Day 94, 112 Nakba, the 10, 94, 96, 102–3, 105, 108–10, 113, 168–9, 171–4, 176, 190, 193, 236–41, 340 Naqqash, Samir 27, 32 Natural Alternative, The 36 Nazism 264, 269 Ne’eman, Judd 118 Neroni, Hilary 52, 55 “Nonsensical Smile of the Torturer. . ., The” 52

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Nesher, Avi 199 Neumann, Erich 277 Fear of the Feminine, The 277 New Direction 36, 39 Nichols, Bill 101 Nishawi, Ya‘aqub 35 Nizri, Yigal 46 Eastern Appearance 46 No. 17 43 Nora, Pierre 7, 124–6 “Between History and Memory” 124 Norman, Lourie 227 North by Northwest 203 nostalgia 24–5, 33, 37, 126, 139–40, 173, 184, 191 Nussbaum, Raphael 301, 311 Occupation 1, 11, 26, 42, 51, 58, 61–3, 109, 167–9, 172–4, 177–8, 182–4, 189–92, 235–6, 247, 340 Oedipus 283 Ofek, David 38, 43 Once I Was 286–9, 290 Holocaust, traces of the 287, 289 matchmaking as a purification ritual 287–8 sexual seduction and the Holocaust 288 One of Us 243 Ophir, Adi 110 Ophuls, Max 208 Oriental Front, The 36 Oslo accords, the 108 Others, The 208 Ottoman Land Code, the 337 Our Country 231 Ovadia, George 36 Oz, Amos 242 Scenes from Village Life 242 Palestine Remembered (website) 343, 349 Palestinian cinema 11, 167–8 Palestinian masculinity 172–3 castrated 174 Palestinian Occupied Territories see Occupation paranoia 206 Parks, Lisa 342

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Index Pashkevil 185 passing 176–81, 183, 193 spatial 178 Perlov, David 10, 73–87 Perspectives Judeo-arabes 36 phylogenetic fantasy (Freud’s) 8 Pianist, The 268 Pillar of Fire 301, 318 death and rebirth, formula of 307–8 death on the desert in 306–8 Holocaust, the trauma of the 308 places of memory see sites of memory Polanski, Roman 203, 208–9, 211, 268 Pontalis, Jean Bertrand 172–3 Fantasme Originaire (with Laplanche) 172 Porat, Dina 265 postmemory 8, 84 post-trauma 11, 167, 175, 192, 234, 266 post-traumatic memory 11, 168–9, 173, 176 post-traumatic spaces 193 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 5–6, 205–6, 223, 264 see also post-trauma symptoms 206 Preminger, Otto 306 primal fantasies (Urphantasien) 172 Promised Land, the 23, 28, 34, 228, 300, 303, 304, 318 propaganda films, Zionist 226–30, 306 circular structure as a vehicle 229 Psycho 208 punctum 85 see also studium queering terror 167–93 Questions of a Dead Worker 35 Rabbi’s 12 Children, The 33 Rabin, Yitzhak 108, 148 Rabinowitz, Dan 348–9 “Right to Refuse. . ., The” 348 Racine, Jacques 107, 156 racism 1, 41, 55, 211 Radstone, Susannah 6 Raimi, Sam 203 Rancière, Jacques 81

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Rebecca 207 Reibenbach, Tsipi 233, 236 repetition 79, 107, 120, 124, 134–6, 139, 152, 175, 186, 188, 206, 229–30, 236, 239 Repulsion 203 responsibility, objective and subjective 100 Sartrean concept of 101 Ricochets 123, 243 Riklis, Eran 123, 242 Ringworm Children, The 23, 40, 45 roadblock movie 330–1, 345, 347 see also 9 Star Hotel Rogoff, Irit 336 Roof, The 331 Rosemary’s Baby 208 Roth-Arriaza, Naomi 112 Route 181 26 Rozenwax, Uri 40 Sabra(s) 2–3, 11, 28, 122–3, 148–50, 153, 155, 158–9, 272, 307–8, 313 Saldanha, Carlos 210 Sallah Shabbati 28 Samir 32 Sandler, Meytal 56, 59 Sangam 36–7 Sarrousi, Nissim 35 Sartre, Jean Paul 101 Being and Nothingness 101 Schindler’s List 268, 283, 285–6, 291 Scouting Patrol 301, 318 border-crossing in 310 departure from the national-heroic mold 310 Scouting Patrol 309–12 “screen memory” (Deckerinnerung) 6 Sea of Tears, A 35 second Intifada, the 11, 107, 127, 169, 172, 178, 184, 193 see also Intifada Secret beyond the Door 207 settlement 1, 25, 117, 122, 301, 306–8, 313 Arab 103 Jewish 40, 231, 301

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370

Index

Settlement, the (Yishuv) 301–2 Palestinian 105, 228 Sfatayim musical group 35–6 shadow cinema 12, 265, 292 Shagrir, Micha 301, 312, 317 Shakespeare, William, Merchant of Venice, The 315 shame 273–4, 279, 282–5, 287, 289–91 role in Holocaust discourse 267 Sharon, Ariel 117 Shechter, Rivka 278 Auschwitz as the Kingdom of Faust. . . 278 Shemer, Yaron 46 Shemesh, Kokhavi 44 Shemesh, Tali 40 Sherman, Ranen Omer 180 Sh’hur 37 Shining, The 75 Shoah 84 shock 24, 39 Shohat, Ella 105, 118 see also Mizrahim Shuroo 153 Shyamalan, M. Night 211 Silver Tray 74 Silverman, Kaja 170, 172 Simon, Joshua 202, 209, 211 “Certain Tendency of the Israeli Cinema, A” 202 Sinai Campaign, the 313 Siodmak, Robert 207 site-seeing 330 site-specific documentary 332–6 sites of memory 13, 125–6, 133, 300–1, 318 Six-Day War, the 230–1, 313 smuggling tunnel see tunnel Somech, Aya 35 South—Alice Never Lived Here, The 32–3 spatial turn 13, 330 Spielberg, Steven 268 Spiral Staircase, The 207 Spring 1941 267, 283–6, 289–91 Holocaust, traces of the 284 Standard Operating Procedure 52–9 Star Wars 212 Straus, Florence 30 studium 85 see also punctum suicide terror 167–8, 183, 191

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Suleiman, Elia 30 Suspicion 207 Tadmor, Erez 199 Tal, Ran 38 Talmor, Tzipi 40 Taqasim 32 Tarantino, Quentin 263–4 Taxi to the Dark Side 52 Tel Katzir 73 Tenant, The 208 terrorism 1, 62, 167–8, 183, 191, 200, 205, 215, 228 Tesson, Charles 238 testimony 6, 10, 62, 73–5, 79, 83–5, 241 Through the Veil of Exile 42 Thurmeier, Mike 210 Tkuma (TV series) 23 Tlalim, Asher de Bentolila 32 To See If I’m Smiling 51–5, 56, 56–63 Torati, Benny 25, 35, 36, 38 torture 52, 54 Tourneur, Jacques 207 Trabelsi, Osnat 45 transference 332–3 trauma 1–3, 5–13, 52, 56, 61–2, 84, 118–20, 122, 126, 132, 134, 136–40, 169, 171, 173, 175–6, 189–90, 192, 199–200, 205–6, 212–14, 223–7, 231–4, 236–7, 239, 241–2, 244–5, 247–9, 264–5, 272, 289, 291, 308, 318, 332–4, 340, 343 Caruth on 120 definition of 6 and memory studies 5–8 traumatic memory 121, 173, 224 treescape 336 trilogy, Assi Dayan’s 147–61 absence of temporal reference in 152 see also Electric Blanket Named Moshe, An; Life according to Agfa; Mr. Baum True Story of Palestine, The 4 Truffaut, François 202 Tsoffar, Ruth 46 Tuan, Yi-Fu 300 tunnel 344–6

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Index Two Mrs. Carrolls, The 208 Tyler, Carole-Anne 179 unconscious memory-traces 8 Under Capricorn 207 Undercurrent 207 Underdogs 35 Unpromised Land 39 Uris, Leon 306 Uroborus, the 277–9 vagina dentata 169–73 Vanilla Sky 204 victim 1, 6–7, 12, 40, 42, 52–3, 62, 94–6, 98, 100–6, 109–12, 118, 120, 123–4, 127, 150, 173, 184, 190, 225–6, 236, 240–5, 247, 264–6, 268–70, 272–4, 278, 282, 287, 291 Vietnam War, the 5, 118 Vineyard of Hope, The 40 Virilio, Paul 77 Waldman, Diane 217 Walk on Water 270–5, 283, 289–90 Holocaust, traces of the 271–3 Walker, Janet 6, 121 Waltz with Bashir 122, 124, 242, 244–5, 248 traumatic traces in 241–3 War of Attrition, the 313 war films 35, 118–19, 121, 124, 212, 243, 264–5, 268, 313 War of Independence 3, 109, 301, 306 War of Lebanon 313 Warhol, Andy 79 Wasted 117–24 traumatic memories in 118–22 Water Lilies series 79 Weizman, Eyal 341, 344, 346

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Whale, James 212 What a Gang 4 White Gold/Black Labor 40 White Walls 35 Who is Mordechai Vanunu? 43 Winter Games 242–7 witness 6–8, 11, 52, 56, 61, 81, 84–5, 126, 171, 176, 205, 267, 269, 271, 273–4, 282, 308, 315, 347 Wooden Gun, The 245 working-through 8, 12, 224–5, 230, 233, 236, 239, 248 world cinema 1, 209–13 wound 2, 118–19, 135–7, 200, 225, 243, 275, 278–9, 306–7, 311, 314 see also trauma Yarom, Tamar 51 Yediot Aharonot 149 yetzia (exit) 23 see also Aliya; displacement Yizhar, S. 242, 244 Khirbet Khizeh 242, 247–8 Yom Kippur War 148, 150, 230, 243, 313 Yoredet 32, 39, 45 Yosef, Raz 272 Yossi and Jagger 182, 186 Zada, Benny 35, 39 Zanger, Anat 149, 330–3 “Blind Space. . .” 330 Zerubavel, Yael 148–9, 163 Zionism 4, 22–5, 29, 39, 43, 96, 102–4, 108–9, 151, 160, 226, 247, 265, 300 Zionist history 4, 96, 102, 305 Žižek, Slavoj 161 Zohar, Uri 319 Zomer, Yossi 123

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