Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Have the fine employees of the Israeli Foreign Ministry gotten the message that self-abasement is an ineffective diplomatic tool? Apparently not.
The Israeli Consulate of to New England is listed as a sponsor of a showing of the film Z32 by Avi Mograbi at the Harvard Film Archive:
Z32 is built around a confession-- a young man's account of his participation in the revenge killing of two Palestinian police officers by the Israeli army in the occupied territories...
A rather obscure film that I doubt many people have seen, I think we can get a taste for what the Israeli Government itself is sponsoring from a couple of the IMDB.com reviews:
A documentary about terrorists, where the criminals themselves confess their sins on camera, with their faces blurred so that no one can recognize them. As an idea, it's actually pretty interesting...
The director, Avi Mograbi, structures the film like this: on one level we have the Israeli terrorist who, encouraged by his girlfriend, tapes a confession where he expresses his regret for killing two Palestinian police officers during a reprisal operation. The girlfriend testifies on camera too, on the condition that her face be unrecognizable. On the other level, we have a series of Lynchian musical interludes, staged by Mograbi himself, which have no connection whatsoever to what's being told and seem to have been inserted simply to extend the running time. There are also additional scenes where the terrorist visits the crime scene with a friend, providing further insight.
Artistically speaking, the director might even have had an interesting point to make with this new, unprecedented approach to the subject of terrorism...
And...
Mr. Mograbi delivers another complex journey into the deep psyche of the Israeli murder machine. The filmmaker always thinks his projects all the way through and Z32 also lacks any ideological gaps. Z32 is the file number of one soldier's testimony of his unit's revenge mission where he ambushed and killed unarmed Palestinians. He agrees to do the film, but only if his face is not shown.
If the challenge of making a film based on an interview with one person without showing his face isn't enough, Mograbi decides that it should be a musical as well. The filmmaker sings in his living room throughout the piece, songs he wrote himself while making the film. Catchy lyrics include, "Put a mask on him so we don't have to see what evil looks like," "Am I harboring a murderer because it makes a good film," and "My wife said, 'Don't film him in our living room.'" The filmmaker once again dives into the village to show us the universal and isn't afraid of the absurdity intrinsic in the horror.
Mr. Mograbi and I had a brief but meaningful conversation after the film about Truth and Reconciliation Trials. In his words, "We have to say what we've done to each other."
Great. So the Israeli Government is sponsoring an "Israelis as terrorists" film, whose director feels he's doing a reconciliation job while the other side is still at war (barring someone who seen this thing stepping forward to say that the reviews and description are way off). Have the Hasbara genius diplomats of Israel's foreign service figured out that these kinds of confessional self-abasement sessions have bought them absolutely nothing, and not for lack of trying. Far from getting credit, the haters will take it and say, "Yes, you are evil, glad you finally noticed, thanks for confirming what we've been saying all along" and the people in the middle who don't know much will say, "Wow, the Israelis are really pretty bad themselves. The media HAS been lying to us." It's a double loss.
Making Israel's case is difficult, I know, but how about not doing the other side's work for them? Isn't that rule #1?
The fact that Israelis make such films, and that Harvard would show them, is the sort of dog bites man story that wouldn't even be worth a blog posting. But the fact that the Israeli Consulate would sponsor it makes it outrageous. Paging Consul Nadav Tamir...You're supposed to be a sharp guy, so what's going on in your house?
[h/t: Seva]
