A long mini series like this one, four episodes of eighty-eight minutes each, enables the director to explore his subject in full detail. His subject is Palestine from 1945, and a little before with the concentration camps and their liberation in the background though that episode is in Europe, to today, right now today with the case of Gaza and the Wall. The story is built around the diary of a British soldier who was there from 1945 to 1948. The man is in hospital dying and his grand daughter discovers his diary and decides to go with her best friend to Israel for the vacation. Her best friend is an Israeli citizen and has to do her military service during her vacation. The girl tries to find the Palestinian friends of her grand father to give them back a key she has found in the diary and she is reading the diary at the same time, so that we jump from the past to the present and vice versa constantly.
But the interest of the film is not that dramatic, slightly sentimental line of approach. It is the pretext to take us everywhere in Israel and around and to witness what the Israeli soldiers are doing to the Palestinians today, the light resistance among Israelis against the war, and the way Israelis literally victimize the Palestinians to force them to leave so that Jewish settlers can take their place. The Israeli army is there to protect the settlers not to keep the peace and so let that victimization go on.
Then the parallel with what the Jewish nationalists did in 45-48 from wild bombing against the British army to the violence against the Palestinians and to the genocidal cleansing of some areas when they took over after the UN decision. Nothing has changed as for that: their objective is to re-conquer the whole Holy Land and nothing else because it was promised to them by God himself. And that promise is the backbone of the film.
The backbone because the film builds a parallel between what happened to the Jews in Europe under Hitler, the terrorism against the British and then the Palestinians from the Jews in Palestine up to 1948 and finally to what they are doing to the Palestinians today, killing blindly when necessary, chasing the Palestinians in the streets in Israel where they still are, and invading and destroying houses in Palestinian territories in the name of their fight against terrorism.
Terrorism is the main word of this drama. Hitler was a genocidal terrorist, but then the Jewish terrorists of 45-48, and the Israeli terrorists today who act in military uniforms against the Palestinians they call terrorists are seen as being just as brutal and inhumane as Hitler. You can see the idea that comes up from this constant parallel built into the series by the older period and the present alternating all the time and by the language and the situations that are so similar. And that conclusion, that hypothesis are absolutely unbearable. And yet no logical mind can avoid coming to it.
Yet facts and events are there to prove we are not insane. So what solution can there be? The film does not say anything about the future that looks bleak for the Palestinians on the brink of being completely eradicated from Palestine and the constant war that makes the Israeli state a military state governed by retired generals.
The only possible future is one state with all creeds and religions but this reunification of Palestine as a multi-confessional but secular state is just a dream. A dream, you said? When the military autocratic Arab states are falling like ripe fruits in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and military states of emergency are finally disbanded little by little in Algeria and even in Iraq, which is not an Arab state even if it is a Moslem country, we can wonder why Israel should remain the last one to be governed by generals, even retired, and living in a constant state of war against some fictitious and manipulated terrorist menace.
But everyone is going to tell me Palestine is not ready for a re-unified state. And I will conclude that there is absolutely no reason why Germany could be reunited, Vietnam could be reunited, South Africa could be racially reunited, and yet Palestine could not be. That is absurd and history hates absurdity. So time will be what time will bring and que sera que sera. I will see it before dying.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
But the interest of the film is not that dramatic, slightly sentimental line of approach. It is the pretext to take us everywhere in Israel and around and to witness what the Israeli soldiers are doing to the Palestinians today, the light resistance among Israelis against the war, and the way Israelis literally victimize the Palestinians to force them to leave so that Jewish settlers can take their place. The Israeli army is there to protect the settlers not to keep the peace and so let that victimization go on.
Then the parallel with what the Jewish nationalists did in 45-48 from wild bombing against the British army to the violence against the Palestinians and to the genocidal cleansing of some areas when they took over after the UN decision. Nothing has changed as for that: their objective is to re-conquer the whole Holy Land and nothing else because it was promised to them by God himself. And that promise is the backbone of the film.
The backbone because the film builds a parallel between what happened to the Jews in Europe under Hitler, the terrorism against the British and then the Palestinians from the Jews in Palestine up to 1948 and finally to what they are doing to the Palestinians today, killing blindly when necessary, chasing the Palestinians in the streets in Israel where they still are, and invading and destroying houses in Palestinian territories in the name of their fight against terrorism.
Terrorism is the main word of this drama. Hitler was a genocidal terrorist, but then the Jewish terrorists of 45-48, and the Israeli terrorists today who act in military uniforms against the Palestinians they call terrorists are seen as being just as brutal and inhumane as Hitler. You can see the idea that comes up from this constant parallel built into the series by the older period and the present alternating all the time and by the language and the situations that are so similar. And that conclusion, that hypothesis are absolutely unbearable. And yet no logical mind can avoid coming to it.
Yet facts and events are there to prove we are not insane. So what solution can there be? The film does not say anything about the future that looks bleak for the Palestinians on the brink of being completely eradicated from Palestine and the constant war that makes the Israeli state a military state governed by retired generals.
The only possible future is one state with all creeds and religions but this reunification of Palestine as a multi-confessional but secular state is just a dream. A dream, you said? When the military autocratic Arab states are falling like ripe fruits in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and military states of emergency are finally disbanded little by little in Algeria and even in Iraq, which is not an Arab state even if it is a Moslem country, we can wonder why Israel should remain the last one to be governed by generals, even retired, and living in a constant state of war against some fictitious and manipulated terrorist menace.
But everyone is going to tell me Palestine is not ready for a re-unified state. And I will conclude that there is absolutely no reason why Germany could be reunited, Vietnam could be reunited, South Africa could be racially reunited, and yet Palestine could not be. That is absurd and history hates absurdity. So time will be what time will bring and que sera que sera. I will see it before dying.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU