Posted on November 23, 2015
A Flawed Model? Or the Only One That Now Works?
New Film Tells the Story of the Occupation Through the Eyes of Israeli Jews
What if you had filmed a documentary on life under Israeli occupation and then later, after the documentary was released, one of the Palestinians you had interviewed, and who had appeared in your film, was shot by Israeli soldiers, presumably in retaliation? How would it make you feel?
Such matters are among the subjects discussed in a lengthy article published recently at Americans for Middle East Understanding. The article is written by Tom Hayes, an independent filmmaker since the late 1970s and whose documentaries have appeared on PBS and elsewhere. In the course of his lengthy career, Hayes has made three documentaries on Occupied Palestine–one released in 1985, the second in 1997, and the most recent, “Two Blue Lines,” which came out earlier this year.
His first film on Palestine, Native Sons: Palestinians in Exile, was filmed largely in Lebanon, but his second–People and the Land–was filmed inside Palestine, and those Palestinians who worked with him on it, i.e. those who agreed to be interviewed as well as those who were part of his film crew, suffered retribution. One of them was warned to “stop that journalism shit,” and then later shot in the stomach.
All of which led Hayes to adopt what he refers to as “Plan B” in the making of Two Blue Lines. Obviously Israeli Jews, in cooperating on such a film project, don’t run the same risk that Palestinians do–and so virtually all of the subjects interviewed for this latest documentary are I guess what you might refer to as “Jews of conscience.” This means in essence, of course, that the film tells the story of the occupation through Jewish eyes, rather than Palestinian eyes, which will strike some people as farcical or preposterous–and indeed that’s how it struck Hayes at first. But it was the method he eventually chose, apparently out of necessity.
Jews of conscience, I suppose, can be expected to speak of such things as how the occupation runs contrary to “Jewish values” and the like, and indeed if you look at the trailer below, you’ll see and hear a bit of that. But apparently even Hayes himself is of a rather similar mindset, making reference to a “Jewish ethical tradition,” as he puts it in his article. And this might give us pause to thought.
There are of course good Jews. And there are bad Jews. (As is the case with any group of people.) And if we look around us today, judging not only from what we see going on in Israel but also the support that the Jewish state gets from Jews abroad, it would appear that the “bad Jews” outnumber the “good Jews,” perhaps by a fairly considerable margin. Despite that, though, we are supposed to take it on faith that there exists such a thing as a “Jewish ethical tradition.” It has always struck me as flawed logic.
But there is another problem with it as well. If I, as a white American, were to lay claim to having “white values” or to begin making conversational references to a “white ethical tradition,” I would, quite naturally, be called a racist. So why are Jews given a free pass when they do the same? Why do people, including Jews themselves–and yes, Jews of conscience most especially of all–not hear with their ears and recognize all this talk about “Jewish values” as having the same sort of supremacist overtones? But it seems they don’t. And this, I think, may be one of the problems lying at the root of the occupation, and why it has gone on for as long as it has.
Yet these are the people through whose eyes Hayes tells the story of the occupation. To be clear–I’m not passing judgement. I can’t. I haven’t seen the film. All I’ve seen is the trailer below. It may well be that it’s a good film. Or it may be, as I say, that it’s a flawed model for a documentary but the only real option available, particularly now with an intifada in full swing. If you’re curious to find out for yourself, you can order the film here.
Below is an excerpt from Hayes’ article. As I mentioned above, the full article is quite lengthy. In it, the author makes some good points, and maybe a few that are not so good, but overall, it is an article well worth reading, and it definitely gives you a taste of the trials and tribulations of trying to film a documentary in Occupied Palestine.
Between Two Blue Lines
By Tom Hayes
Why Plan B
In 1981, when the fire lit under me, I was reading anything I could lay my hands to about Palestine, Palestinians, political Zionism, the creation of Israel. One text of particular clarity was (and still is) The Question of Palestine by Edward Said. I called Professor Said at Columbia and explained that I didn’t think Americans had any idea what was happening to Palestinians. I wanted to do a film that would change that, and had found his book particularly illuminating. Would he come on board as a consultant for the project? Edward was polite in the face of my naiveté.
This isn’t an exact quote, but it’s close, “Tom, it’s nice that you care, but we Palestinians need to take control of our own narrative.” He indicated that he was just too busy with that enterprise to help. Edward eventually relented and assisted me with writing the voice-over for Native Sons: Palestinians in Exile.
I never forgot that first interaction with Professor Said. His seminal statement about who needs to be holding the reigns on the Palestinian narrative rang in me. I worked very hard in both Native Sons and People and The Land to create work that would at least serve as conduits for Palestinian voices, that they might reach American ears.
Yet, staring into the screens in my editing suite in 2005, the film that was peering back at me flew in the face of Professor Said’s injunction. I noticed that some of the Israelis I filmed on “Plan B days” were actually telling the truth—the honest, empathic, truth of the enslavement of Palestinian people and the attack on their culture at the hands of the Zionist project. Not old school retail enslavement where the owner is responsible for food and shelter of those whose lives he “owns.” I’m talking wholesale, big lots of enslavement; just chain their lives, let them starve, and hope they find a way to run away.
In 2007, I cobbled together enough grants to mount another production trip to Palestine. I wanted to be there for the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 war.
I got a great wake-up call from one of my enablers in Gaza on that trip. I was prohibited by Israeli forces from entering Gaza, but Palestinian friends were there filming for me. My friend, Mohammed, said something that forever changed how I see “the situation.” We were discussing filming dates and I was adamant that cameras be rolling through what I was calling “the anniversary of the occupation,” June 5, 1967. He was perplexed. “June 5th, not May 14th? Oh, you’re talking about the anniversary of the Naksa, not the Nakba.”
Mohammed was born in a refugee camp in Gaza. For him, for his parents, for all the people of his hometown, the occupation began on the day that Israel declared its independence. It began with the Nakba, the Catastrophe that left his family locked outside their homes, their town, their land. The 1967 war was, as far as he and his community are concerned, the Naksa, the “Setback.” It wasn’t particularly significant for the vast community of Palestinian refugees. For Palestinian refugees, every inch of land controlled by Israel is occupied territory. That is their narrative, lived for sixty-seven years, and it should be recognized.
During that trip I leaned even harder on gathering the testimony of progressive Israeli Jews. Back in the States, sifting the footage, the suspicions that I had had about the film’s intent became clearer. It is that way with a documentary. There is something in a mountain of film that says “I know who I am, what I want to be. Listen to me.” If you wind up with the documentary you thought you were making when you started a project, you probably should have stayed home. You didn’t discover anything new, and stuck with the preconceptions you had when you started.
What was climbing out of the screens into my editing room was the picture of a film that swerved one hundred eighty degrees away from Edward Said’s pronouncement on control of narrative. I started seeing a film that handed the story of the Palestinian experience over to Israeli voices. That seemed too wrong to contemplate. My gut reaction was “No, no, and absolutely not!” I spent about a week prowling the night, thinking, rethinking, rejecting, weighing the approach. It was such a twisted idea, I had a hard time getting my head around it.
There are some life, death, and destruction elements that had to be considered in the equation. There had been Israeli reprisals against individuals and families who spoke candidly to my camera in People and The Land. Abu Imad was shot twice and his family home regularly ransacked by Israeli forces. One of my fixers was shot in the stomach after he ignored an Israeli order to “stop that journalism shit.” The father of one of my subjects died at a checkpoint while suffering a heart attack. The ambulance he was in was denied entry to Jerusalem. This is not hypothetical. The Zionist sword hangs over the neck of every Palestinian. It’s an honor that so many Palestinian people have provided access to their communities and given my camera their testimony. An honor that so many cared to protect me and my crew from the Israeli army.
There is responsibility, and there are consequences for the actions of documentary makers. Every time I have gone back to Palestine the lives of my Palestinian friends have been further debased by the Zionist project. It’s one of the things that has made the work of documenting an inescapable obligation. That and the knowledge that I, and my country, are responsible for that debasement.
I spoke about that grinding guilt with one of my longtime contacts the last time I was in Palestine. He put a gentle hand on my arm and said, “Tom, what makes you think they wouldn’t have shot us if we hadn’t helped you? What makes you think they wouldn’t have imprisoned and tortured us if we hadn’t helped you? You need to forget about that.” It was a very sweet thing to say, but I cannot forget about the horrible things that happened to them, nor can I clear myself of responsibility for that carnage. The blade of the occupation never wavers, patient in its hunt for the next person to defy it. As a filmmaker, you’d be crazy not to think about that, if you care at all for your fellow human beings.
On a trip after the second Intifada I contacted a health care professional who had provided excellent clinical analysis of the impact of Israeli ordnance on Palestinian bodies during the first uprising. I was curious about the escalation in degree and scope of injuries he had recently encountered. I was invited to his home outside of Jerusalem and, after tea, I broached my request to film with him again. He politely declined. “I knew you were going to ask me this. I can’t do it. It’s not worth it.” He explained that his wife had cancer and they had to go to Jerusalem for her treatments. “I could lose our permits if I appear in a film.” I didn’t press him. The tentacles of the occupation reach into every cranny of people’s lives. His was a well founded fear.
There was a time when speaking on camera about the occupation would, at worst, get a Palestinian beaten and jailed. Those were “the good old days” before the policy of targeted murder was adopted. Israel has murdered hundreds of Palestinians under that policy. Israel’s murderous brutality in the West Bank and Gaza has increased to such a point that even drawing forward footage from “the good old days” for a new film could be a death warrant for my subjects.
Just as I have footage of Stephen Langfur aging twenty years on film, so do I have footage of many Palestinians aging before the camera as their lives are squeezed in the vise of Israel’s systematic denial of their humanity. It is gripping, sometimes inspiring, and horribly tragic material.
As I prowled the night wrestling with the mode of retelling the story of Palestine, weighing the possible impact of my options, I came to a turning point.
I am no longer going to gamble the lives and families of my friends by putting them in a film that might or might not positively impact their lives. Not until they either live as free human beings, or cease to exist at all. Palestinian filmmakers know the risk/reward equation within their own community. I leave it to them and their subjects to take control of their own images and narrative.
Concurrent with the concrete implications of mode and content I was also weighing the profoundly racist nature of American media. It occurred to me that what lay before me was an opportunity. If the only voices that are presented by the media as “unbiased” vis-a-vis the I/P conflict are Jewish voices, I could build a film from Jewish voices that are actually telling the truth. Not denying, distorting, distracting, or engaging in deceit (4D Zio-ganda).
I could deploy not just Jewish voices, but Israeli Jewish voices, speaking with human empathy and passion, the truth of what the Zionist project has done to the indigenous people of Palestine.
That’s exactly what had climbed out of the screens into my editing room: an opportunity to weaponize racism against itself.
I am an utterly unapologetic proponent of human equality. I don’t believe that you have to have been a slave to know that slavery is repugnant. I have not known the experience of slavery, but I sure as hell know that practicing it is a moral abyss. Just as the strong voices of my Israeli subjects in Two Blue Lines know that the enslavement of the Palestinian people is a moral abyss.
In the end, if you truly believe in human equality, then any informed person of conscience can tell this story. I myself am not Palestinian and have been trying to find an effective means of telling this story throughout my adult life.
It goes to the title of the film. The Israeli flag contains two blue lines. Two parallel blue lines that cannot intersect anymore than the Zionist project will ever truly intersect with the Jewish ethical tradition.
There’s something else that you can do with two blue lines. You can make an equals sign. In Palestine, equality has got the deep down blues real bad.
Full article here
Uprooted Palestinian 
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