problems of humanity

Once again, the argument came up in my feature class that my Gaza script is not "balanced" because it has no sympathetic Israeli characters. This argument has come up before, and I am often tempted to shout "that's not the point!" and be done with it, but I realize that that is not a very persuasive way to win anyone over to my point of view.

However, the persistence of this argument highlights some of the unique storytelling problems I've faced when writing this script. The core issue is this: when the way you see and understand a particular world is very different from--in fact, almost diametrically opposed to--the way it is perceived by the majority of Americans, how do you bridge the gap?

With Israel/Palestine, the first hurdle is a basic problem of misinformation. The US media constantly tells us that the Israelis are the victims in this situation, that they are under attack, that they have "a right to defend themselves." Their army is called a "defense force"--what could be wrong with that? We are constantly encouraged to sympathize with Israeli suffering, with victims of suicide attacks, with kids growing up under Hamas rocket fire in Sderot.

The Palestinians, for their part, are terrorists at worst, and passive victims caught between warring extremists at best. They are "othered" at every turn. We are told that they live in a culture of martyrdom, that they teach their children hate, that they would drive the Jews into the sea if they could.

So, on the first, most basic level, this script is an act of affirmative action of humanity--giving Palestinian characters not just humanity, diversity and individuality, but agency. I didn't just want to make the point that, contrary to what the media would have us believe, the Israelis are the oppressors and the Palestinians are the oppressed. That is only half the battle. Just showing that the Palestinians are oppressed, occupied, and suffering is not, in itself, a radical artistic statement. But to show them as people who are actively fighting for their liberation, in many different ways, and to invite the audience to sympathize with that struggle, is indeed radical.

In screenplays, characters don't fully come alive until they face conflict. That means they must be trying to do something and encounter an obstacle. The way they deal with that obstacle is what makes us identify with them.

If your protagonists are Palestinians trying to break the siege of Gaza, it is pretty clear that your antagonists are going to be the IDF and Shabak (the Israeli secret police--there isn't really an equivalent organization to compare them to in the US.)

As a screenwriter, one faces the problem that these two organizations are not exactly the greatest representatives of Israeli humanity. It is, honestly, a bit hard for me to care that much about humanizing the IDF when my imagination is stuffed to the brim with tale after tale of savagery, humiliation and deliberate cruelty from Operation Cast Lead.

I realize that as a writer, I am facing the exact same problem that Palestinians face--how do you teach your children that not all Israelis are violent occupiers when every Israeli they've ever seen is holding an M-16? This is a reality of life in the Occupied Territories--and one of the goals of my script is to help people understand that world.

Of course I know that not every Israeli soldier is an inhuman beast. (Although the fact that I feel I have to actively state this shows how far the discourse has been tilted in Israel's favor.) Yes, of course, they are people, individuals with feelings, and I'm sure many of them have doubts about their actions in the Territories from time to time. But they are also cogs in the machinery of one of the most vicious and prolonged occupations in modern history--and that has a concrete effect on their humanity, on how they act as individuals. The IDF, like any army, puts a lot of effort into driving out any scrap of empathy in its soldiers, since their mission is to kill and oppress another group of people. And it largely succeeds. If you need further proof of the depths of dehumanization of Palestinians that the IDF allows (and, I would argue, encourages), just read this article from Ha'aretz--if you can stomach the whole thing.

There is another difference between the IDF and almost any other modern army, which has to do with the nature of Israel as a colonial settler state. The IDF's mission is not the same as, say, the mission of US soldiers in Iraq. The mission of the US army in Iraq--in a broad sense--is to enforce the United States's imperial control over the Middle East and its oil. This benefits US corporations, who make a profit, and the US state, which gets leverage over anyone else who needs foreign oil (almost every country in the world, but most importantly Europe and the rising economic powers of Asia.) This is a mission which, I would argue, is not in interest of the US soldiers themselves. In fact, it is directly against their interests--since their government is sending them to kill and die to secure profits and power that they (the US soldiers) will never see. In fact, I would argue that the ordinary Americans who serve in the US army have more in common with the ordinary Iraqis they're being sent to fight than with the people who control the government that's sending them to do the fighting.

But in Israel, the situation is a bit different. Because the mission of the IDF is to defend Israel as it currently exists--as a colonial state for Jews only. Israel was formed by driving out 750,000 non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants, to create a Jewish majority in a land where there hadn't been one before. As long as Israel exists as a state for Jews only (which, more often than not, has really meant white European Jews), the Palestinians will be a threat by their very existence. The Israeli army's mission will only be complete when every Palestinian is either ghettoized and completely subservient (impossible, in my opinion), driven out of historic Palestine (a very possible, but incomplete solution), or exterminated (the final solution, one might say.) Of course, only the most right-wing fringe elements of Israeli society will come out and actually say this--but those fringe elements are gaining increasing traction.

There is really only one historic parallel to this situation I can think of, which is the formation of the United States. The IDF acts, not so much like the US Army of today, but quite a bit like the US cavalry of the 1800s, which spent the better part of a century slaughtering the native inhabitants of the middle part of the North American continent, forcing them onto reservations, and stealing their land for use by European settlers.

This is an important point, because the citizens of a colonial settler state are somewhat different than the citizens of any other state. Israel is a very peculiar entity, because, unlike almost any other state in the world, its citizens are bound together by a common interest as colonizers in someone else's land. The citizens of Israel benefit from direct aid by the United States, which subsidizes modern roads (on which Palestinians cannot drive) affordable housing and modern infrastructure side by side with places like Gaza, in which many neighborhoods still lack sewage systems. The Israeli state secures the most fertile land and the majority of the water in a desert climate for its Jewish citizens, and, by and large, keeps Israeli workers' wages high by preventing competition from Palestinian workers who could almost certainly be forced to work for less. (Although this has been undercut somewhat in recent years by Israel importing cheap labor from Asia and Eastern Europe, so afraid are they to let Palestinians have even the crappiest jobs in Israel.)

This is the secret that keeps Israeli politics sliding further and further to the right, that makes Israel's poor the most right-wing section of the population instead of the most radical, and that allows Israel to conduct genocidal operations like Cast Lead with hardly a peep of protest from its own population, many of whom are themselves the descendants of the survivors of another genocide.

Of course, this does not mean that individual Israelis cannot work for peace with justice and feel compassion and solidarity with the Palestinians--many of them do, but they are a brave minority. And any Israeli who wants to fundamentally change the situation has to reckon with the fact that their state is based on the racist exclusion of the majority of the historic population of the region, and that no lasting peace will come without addressing that fundamental problem.

What is the point of going into all this, since I'm certainly not going to take time out from the action of my script to discuss the class nature of Israel as a colonial settler state? The point is that how you understand the world affects how you make art about it. I am just not going to write about the two sides as if they are equal, because I do not believe them to be. On one side, you have colonial occupiers, armed with the most modern military technology in the world and subsidized by billions of dollars of aid from the most powerful nation in the world, the United States. On the other side you have people who have been expelled from their homes and made refugees (sometimes several times over), forced into camps, walled in, thrown in prison for things as minor as displaying their nation's flag, besieged by air, land, and sea, denied the most basic degree of political sovereignty, and had every aspect of their lives and livelihoods relentlessly attacked, but who have continued to fight back for 60 years, despite being vastly militarily outmatched.

Fittingly enough for this discussion, this week in Script Analysis, we watched what is perhaps the most brilliant political film of all time, The Battle of Algiers. I wrote in an earlier post how, despite the fact that many people laud the film for its even-handedness, The Battle of Algiers very carefully and consciously aligns the audience's emotions with the Algerians from the beginning. The sneaky genius of The Battle of Algiers is that it's constructed in a way that allows some people to think it is even-handed, when it was actually conceived as a consciously anti-imperalist project and a calculated defense of the right of oppressed people to resist by any means necessary.

Algeria (like its parallel at the other end of the continent, South Africa) was also a modern settler colony, and it is quite interesting to see how the French settlers are presented in the film. One of the unique features of The Battle of Algiers is that crowds can be analyzed as characters in the film. In class, we discussed how the Algerian crowd, which can also be identified as "the Algerian people" (in a somewhat abstract, Maoist-inspired formulation entirely appropriate to the era) has a character arc. It grows and changes every time we see it. Specifically, it goes from being passive to being revolutionary--a really brilliant way to externalize on film the radicalization of a society. The French crowd, however, is a one-string character, which is defined in our class as "a character who does the same thing each time we see them." The thing that the French crowd does is react with misplaced, racist rage. It does not change, grow, or learn anything.

There is one notable time that we see the French crowd as something other than a racist mob--in the scenes where large numbers of civilians are about to be killed by three female bombers. Right before the bombs go off, we start to see close-ups of individual faces--men, women, dancing teenagers, a kid eating an ice cream cone. The effect of these shots is quite deliberate and unambiguous--to make us question the morality of the violent actions we know are about to happen. But I would argue that the effect is not just to humanize the French, but also to humanize the Algerians. We see what these three women see, and we feel the moral quandary at the exact same moment they do. We are seeing the humanity of the French through the eyes of the Algerians--and this helps us understand the bombers not as psychotic, unthinking terrorists, but as people with humanity who have decided that this is the only way to win their freedom.

Of course, the parallels between my film and The Battle of Algiers only go so far. My film does not take place in, say, Jerusalem, in an environment where Israeli and Palestinian civilians live side by side. It takes places in the Occupied Territories, where Palestinian civilians live side by side with Israeli soldiers. The characters are not engaged in attacks on Israelis at all--it could be argued that their act of resistance, although it involves high explosives, is completely nonviolent. (Which is, of course, one of the things that attracted me to the story in the first place.) If any of these elements were changed, it would certainly effect how I presented both Israeli and Palestinian characters. (Paradise Now, by the way, is a film that has almost no Israeli characters in it at all and still does a brilliant job of problematizing the actions of its Palestinian protagonists.)

There is another difference between my film and The Battle of Algiers, which is that mine is not an ensemble piece. That is a conscious choice on my part. Also in Script Analysis, we discussed how the primary effect of creating a script with one central character with a drive is to heighten emotional identification with that character--which is, of course, exactly what I want. I want my audience to identify with a Palestinian militant. And I don't think that is too much to ask.

In connection with our discussion of The Battle of Algiers, our teacher touched on something which I have long believed to be true, which is that the great power of film is its ability "to extend the reach of human imagination"--to allow us to share and understand the emotional journey of, say, someone who might otherwise be dismissed as a terrorist.

I decided early on in the script that one of the main ways I was going to help people understand the world of the Occupied Territories was simply to show it--to show daily life there by following our characters through this world. I wanted the audience to see this world the way my characters see it, which is also the way I see it. It's a world of checkpoints, closure, siege, walls, air strikes, raids, prison and collective punishment--but also a world of family, solidarity, courage, resistance, love, and hope. In short, a world worth fighting for. When you see and understand this world the way they do, I don't think it is very hard to identify with the drive to blow up a wall and open a border. In fact, I think it feels like something fundamentally, deeply human--the instinctive desire to resist oppression that resides in all of us.