If we are too busy, if we are carried away every day by our projects, our uncertainty, our craving, how can we have the time to stop and look deeply into the situation-our own situation, the situation of our beloved one, the situation of our family and of our community, and the situation of our nation and of the other nations? Thich Nhat Hanh
This week at the Sundance Film Festival two Israeli productions won. The Law In These Parts by Israeli film director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz and “5 Broken Cameras,” a co-production directed by Emad Burnat Co-Written by Guy Davidi and co-directed with Burnat, it is a co-production of Palestinian, Israeli and French funds.
Also this week reports, firstly that twice last week, official Palestinian Authority TV broadcast greetings to the murderers of the Fogel family from the relatives of the killers and from the PA TV host.
Secondly that after 5 meetings in Amman, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Saturday that “Israeli intransigence” was behind the failure of the January Israeli-Palestinian talks in Jordan.
Israel refused during the talks to present a “clear vision” regarding the issues of borders and security.
So how do these unrelated events serve to describe the different mind sets of both Israeli’s and Palestinians?
The Law In These Parts, said Alexandrowicz, “is not about the people who broke the law, but about those entrusted with the law.” The film, which received the prize for Best Documentary at the 2011 Jerusalem International Film Festival, is a film about what the director sees as a moral quandary in Israel, a country founded on democratic principles, that must administer justice in the occupied territories for Palestinians.
Divided into five chapters, the film is filled with candid moments that elicit discomfort as it considers the repercussions of the complex legal frameworks created in the territories following the June 1967 War.
The film asks whether administering the law leads to “justice.” Alexandrowicz includes interviews with the men who created the military laws that administer the occupation, including Alexander Ramati, Dov Shefi, and Justices Amnon Strashnov and Meir Shamgar. The film implicates the viewers and all residents of western democracies and asked them how long democratic values can endure when laws are administered to occupy others.
The film began in mid 2004, when the director received a phone call from the family of a boy who had just turned 16 who was in “The Inner Tour,” an earlier documentary in which Palestinians take a tour of Israel and the towns they left.
The teenager had been removed from his home in the middle of the night by masked Israeli soldiers and charged with throwing stones at a military Jeep. He as held a maximum security prison, and the director was asked by his family to join them for his court hearing.
Alexandrowicz said, “It was enlightening. I had never been in a military court and for the first time in my life, I was in an Israeli military court room, and I was witnessing the mechanism with which my country, my society, purports to administer justice to Palestinian residents of the occupied territories. This event changed my understanding of the situation in which I live.”
The documentary ”5 Broken Cameras,” follows Burnat, a farmer, as he and his family struggle non-violently against the erection of Israel’s separation wall. Why the title? It refers to the five cameras that were broken, or actually destroyed, by Israeli soldiers and authorities during the making of the film.
Art is is often said to be a mirror of identity of individuals or society. A reflection of ideology and the changes occurring within that community, then perhaps these two films amongst others that have recently been produced in and by Israeli’s surely suggests that Israeli’s after 40 odd years of occupation of the territories are psychologically ready for peace.
But however ready they may be, there is still a large distrust of the Palestinians and their psychology. The Palestinians have yet to psychologically move on from 1967.
The leadership and the infrastructure are trapped by years of their own rhetoric , demonizing both the state and Jews in its own media and in the education of its children. A sudden peace with the “enemy” would be seen as betrayal of 4 generations of ‘truths”.
There is also a deep mistrust amongst its own “political ” factions. Problems that seemingly will be only be solved violently. This only adds to the nervousness amongst the Israeli government for whom the winner it will have to deal with in the long run.
The clichéd view that Jewish mothers give their children a huge guilt complex is apparent in films like “The law in these Parts” with the need to make it right. Israel has perhaps not found the political will yet, but the people are surely ready.
For the Palestinians it will take a few more generations to be ready for a change in mindset.
Peace for both will only come with the acceptance of the other.
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