Overcoming Silence - 9 June 2010
Political Landscapes
by Laura Schleifer
To watch Susan Sontag's Promised Lands, an experimental documentary shot just days after Israel was struck in a surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War, in June of 2010—days after Israel launched a surprise attack that killed nine human rights activists attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians—is undoubtedly a very different experience than viewing the film when it first premiered in 1974. It is impossible to absorb this film without interpreting it through the lens of the current political context. A context in which Palestinians suffer under Israel's strangulating blockade of Gaza; a context in which the 2009 'Operation Cast Lead' bombing campaign killed 1400 civilians and left Gaza in ruins.
At the time of the Promised Lands' initial release the film's ambivalent tone, which refused to express unequivocal support for Israel, was considered so controversial that it was banned in "the only democracy in the Middle East". Yet today, watching Promised Lands as a politically-astute Westerner is an exercise in realizing just how far perceptions of Israel and Palestine have recently shifted. Both in terms of world opinion, which has turned from seeing Israel as oppressed to oppressor; and within Israel itself, where global criticism and the extremity of inequality have sparked a small minority of Israelis to speak honestly and critically about the Occupation. The controversy which might surround Promised Lands today would not be that it goes too far in presenting a range of viewpoints; but rather that it presents an extreme lack of them.
Shot at a time when the West almost unanimously considered Israel a victim—both because it had just been unexpectedly attacked on the holiest Jewish holiday by surrounding hostile states; and because the lingering memories of the Holocaust were directly scarring the psyches of any European Jew over thirty—Promised Lands presents a vision of the ongoing battle in the Holy Land from the perspectives of the Israeli/Jewish right and left. There is no Arab or Palestinian perspective whatsoever, and that absence silently haunts the entire film. Would this be deemed acceptable today amongst the internationalist, left-leaning intelligentsia that made up Sontag's audience? Perhaps, but only if the film were explicitly billed as a dialogue between differing Israeli viewpoints, as opposed to one showing differing perspectives more generally. Surprisingly for a female filmmaker, there are no women's voices, which highlights the lack of diversity, especially in a country where the military doesn't discriminate based on gender.
The film opens with Holy Land images that are not Jewish or Muslim, but Christian. A prolonged non-dialogue segment shows the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, accompanied by the sonorous, almost mournful echo of churchbells ringing across the ancient landscape. Images of Greek Orthodox priests and church crosses gradually begin to juxtapose with Muslim and Arab ones: the crescent atop the Al Aqsa Mosque, a Palestinian shepherd tending a flock of goats. Yet, there's no sign of Jewish life anywhere, just a final shot of an antennae atop a building as the modern-day equivalent of the cross and the crescent. Sontag offers no direct commentary, neither here nor anywhere else, but this opening seems to subtly underscore a comment made later in the film by left-wing Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk. "We're really a nuisance in this world. We come from the West, have Western technology and ideals, and we come here why? Because Abraham promised this land 2000, or 4000, or 5000 years ago? You don't just come to reclaim a country."
Yet any doubts about where the film's true sympathies lie are eradicated when, amidst apocalyptic images of decomposing corpses and bullet-riddled tanks in a desert battlefield, an IDF soldier sits in an abandoned Palestinian schoolhouse and reads aloud quotes from racist Arab educators. "The hatred we indoctrinate into the minds of children from birth onward is sacred," wrote the Syrian Minister of Education, while the Jordanian Minister swore, "The Jews were persecuted and despised in Europe because of corruption, means, and treachery."
The quotes are shocking and deplorable—indefensible regardless of circumstance. They're enough to give any Jew what Kaniuk terms a "pogrom complex", when a Jewish person hears any anti-Israeli sentiment and immediately hears 'Auschwitz'. But these quotes set the tone for the entire film, in which Arab crimes are recounted, while the Jews' only sin is in needing a homeland following by greatest atrocity in human history. "Jews never understood tragedy," laments Yoram Kaniuk in a dramatic tone. "The Greeks invented tragedy; we have only drama. The bible has no tragedy. Tragedy is one right opposed to another right."
Against a wordless kaleidoscope of images of modern-day Israel, the remainder of the film consists of the opposing opinions, expressed in voice over, of Left-wing writer Kaniuk, a Jewish-Israeli male from the intellectual class, and… another Jewish-Israeli male from the intellectual class, the right-wing physicist Yuval Ne'eman. Although they disagree on certain points, both Kaniuk and Ne'eman agree that Israel is 'right'. It's only debatable whether the Palestinians represent "another right", as Kaniuk believes, or are simply wrong, as Ne'eman posits.
Taken at face value, Ne'eman's version of the Israeli-Palestinian saga leaves little room for debate. A Jewish child of pre-Israel Palestine, he describes why he doesn't see this as 'the fourth Arab-Israeli war' (after 1947, 1956, and 1967), but rather, as the latest in a series of battles stretching back to Arab raids on Jewish cities in 1920, and the 1929 attack on the Jewish population in Hebron. (How ironic to contrast this with the violent Jewish settlers in Hebron today). Therefore, there is no ambiguity: Arabs and Jews are enemies, plain and simple.
But according to Kaniuk, things are, as he repeatedly puts it, "very complicated". "We found the Arabs here and they have the right to be here, they'd been here for 2000 years," asserts Kaniuk, adding (in a comment that surely contributed to the banning of the film in Israel), "Harvard-educated American Jews come here, why? Because Abraham promised us this land? Why not live in New York, New York is a nice place for Jews... it's very stupid."
Yet for all his talk supporting the Palestinians, Kaniuk, too, paints a picture of Israel that's heavily redacted. This becomes especially apparent when he describes drastic economic changes in the six years between the 1967 War, and the Yom Kippur War. While images of Israeli consumer culture flash across the screen, from a supermarket full of products with names like "Knesset" and "Independence", to familiar images of American consumerism like the Coke logo and the Gerber Baby, Kaniuk describes an Israel that had grown self-centered and mean-spirited as they became wealthier, much like Americans in the 1950's. They'd lost the communal spirit the country had been founded on, with its world-renowned kibbutzes, and were turning into Capitalists. All extremely valid concerns. But Kaniuk fails to mention why there was an enormous boost to the Israeli economy after the 6 Day War. And he fails to articulate how that boost came at such a devastating cost to the Palestinians, a cost they are still paying forty-three years later. In short, the riches that Israel accumulated in the years after 1967 were the direct result of its annexing of Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights, commencing the Occupation that continues to destroy the lives of millions today.
Perhaps even more troubling, Kaniuk displays a shocking sense of Jewish chauvinism even as he's attempting to praise the Palestinians. "The Palestinians are the most intelligent of the Arabs," he announces. "Through their contact with the Jews, they've had a chance to develop beyond other Arabs".
Sontag's choice of imagery doesn't help counteract this. Though her representation of Jewish history in Israel via wax museum dolls is creative and clever, in the end, it is just that: Jewish history in Israel. There is no corresponding representation of Arab history in Palestine. Similarly, images of Jewish women grieving war casualties have no Palestinian counterpart.
Promised Lands aims to be a film that eschews politics in favor of being a universal meditation on the psychological scars incurred by war, as evidenced by the final scene, where a soldier is subjected to a bizarre form of PTSD therapy that recreates the sensations of war through sensory manipulation and drugs. But by silencing all Palestinian voices, refusing to acknowledge their own psychological scars caused by displacement and constant war, it falls far short. From the vantage point of an even darker political landscape, one cannot help but scan the silent, barren desert landscape in the final shot in vain, searching for a Palestinian to respond to Kaniuk's plaintive ultimatum: either we learn to compromise, or we die.