By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — In an article published last week in the Times of Israel, Jessica Steinberg welcomed “a remarkable first for the Israeli film industry: Two local films were named Thursday among the five documentaries nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar.”
The Gatekeepers directed by Dror Moreh and Five Broken Cameras directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi criticize Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories. The former consists of documentary footage and interviews with all the former surviving heads of the Shin Bet since 1980 who expound on a variety of political issues and concur that the suppression of terrorism has been used as an excuse to avoid serious peace negotiations with the PLA and that the expansion of settlements and fixation on a preemptive attack on Iran leadership are ill advised priorities
The latter depicts the repressive Israeli response to the non-violent demonstrations in the West Bank village of Bil’in against the encroachment of Israeli settlements and the security barrier/separation fence on their farmlands. Burnat has filmed these confrontations resulting in the breaking of five of his cameras by Israeli soldiers. These protests led to an Israeli Supreme Court decision in 2007 to change the fence’s route, but it took another four years to implement that ruling.
Columnist Hagai Segal of ynet, the English internet site for the popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, lambasted the nominations” “The Oscar Award which may be heading to Israel should not fill our hearts with joy. It should fill the Palestinians’ hearts with joy, not ours.” Accusing both films of slandering Israel, he charged that their nominations arose “from an international obsession with shaming” Israel. Though not impugning the patriotism of the Shin Bet chiefs, he questioned why they agreed to be interviewed in a film that would “give a moral boost to goys who like to vilify Israel” and that would be released around the same time as the Israeli elections. Nevertheless, Segal conceded that the two films are “well-made.”
Since I have not seen either film, I will reserve judgment of them. Instead, I want to examine whether the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated these films to damage Israel’s standing in the world as Segal insinuates. Based on the critical reception it has received, The Gatekeepers clearly deserved the nomination. According to Metacritic (www.metacritic.com), a website that assigns numerical equivalents to film reviews on a 100 point scale, weighs them reflecting the relative influence of the critic, and then averages the reviews, The Gatekeepers scored an average of 87 which ranks it among a handful of films that garnered “universal acclaim.” Only the nominated documentary How to Survive a Plague about the AIDS epidemic scored that high. The other nominees including 5 Broken Cameras averaged in the high to mid 70s. The Gatekeepers already has won awards in the non-fiction and documentary film categories respectively from the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. It appears on ten of the Top Ten movie lists compiled by the 132 movie critics Metacritic monitors.
Despite its slightly lower Metacritic average, 5 Broken Cameras has impressed critics and done well in award competitions too. Many reviewers have praised its portrait of life on the West Bank and the lyrical quality of its imagery. A.O. Scott of The New York Times observes: that it “provides a grim reminder — just in case you needed one — of the bitter intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A chronicle of protest and endurance, punctuated by violence and tiny glimmers of hope, this documentary is unlikely to persuade anyone with a hardened view of the issue to think again. For anyone who retains an interest in the human contours of the situation, however, the movie is necessary, if difficult, viewing.” 5 Broken Cameras has been honored with the awards for Best Israeli Documentary from the Jerusalem Film Festival and Best World Cinema Documentary from the Sundance Film Festival.
Another way to ascertain if the anti-Israel bias Segal detects motivated the Academy is to look at the other nominations the Academy made and the films it overlooked. How to Survive a Plague, Searching for Sugar Man about the Seventies rock singer Rodriquez, and The Invisible War on rape and sexual harassment in the American military merited nominations. The most surprising omissions in this category were This Is Not a Film about the house arrest of an Iranian political dissident and the one possible “Jewish” contender for a nomination, The Queen of Versailles, a chronicle of the building of a 90,000 square foot mansion by Jackie and David Siegel, the owner of Westgate Resorts, and the toll the recession takes on that project and their relationship.
While the nominations for Best Foreign Film, Documentary Short, and Live Action Short do not deal with the Arab-Palestinian Conflict, two of those for Best Picture possess some relevance to it. Argo’s recreation of the Iran hostage crisis of 1979 has prompted the Islamic Republic to announce its plan to produce a film that will tell the story of that incident from its perspective. Similarly, Zero Dark Thirty’s portrayal of torture as the key to locating and killing Osama Bin Laden has obvious relevance to the efficacy of similar Israeli interrogation techniques described by the Shin Bet chiefs in The Gatekeepers.
Consequently, I conclude that the nomination of the two Israeli documentaries is not part of some broader attempt to delegitimize Israel. It is simplistic to deem criticism of Israeli settlement and occupation policies as inherently anti-Israel, though admittedly the latter can mask the former. Given that nearly 40 % of Jewish Israelis doubt that Israel can maintain control over the West Bank and Gaza and remain a democratic state, the explicit and implicit criticisms expressed in The Gatekeepers and Five Broken Cameras reflect the perspectives of a significant minority of Israeli Jewry.
In this regard I cannot help recalling a segment from The Daily Show. After Obama and Romney addressed the AIPAC Convention, Jon Stewart gleefully looked forward to showing clips to illustrate how the two differed in their stance on Israel. Disappointed that their positions so closely resembled each other, he informed the audience that although he had footage of politicians criticizing Israeli policies, he wouldn’t screen it because they were all speaking Hebrew.
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com
Nicely stated. Like how you tied this in to the segment on The Daily Show.