On Adler’s Bethlehem

Yuval Adler’s Bethlehem (2013) is an Israeli film that focuses on the complicated and ultimately tragic relationship between Razi (Tsahi Halevi), an Israeli security agent, and his informer, Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i), a Palestinian teenager from Bethlehem. As we learn toward the end of the film, the relationship between Sanfur and Razi began when the Israeli authorities arrested Sanfur’s father, and Razi promised to release the father in return for cooperation by the then 13-year-old Sanfur. Like all Palestinian informers, Sanfur (the Arab name for the cartoon Smurfs) has a code name within the Israeli security service, Esau: not a random choice by Adler and Ali Wakad, who wrote Bethlehem’s screenplay. Like the biblical Esau, who sought a father figure, desperately tried to win the approval of his father, and lived in the shadow of his more beloved (and accomplished) brother, Sanfur grew up in the large shadow cast by his older brother, Ibrahim (Hisham Suliman), a feared and admired Palestinian militant who was high on the Israeli most-wanted list. In Razi, the Israeli agent, Sanfur may have a found a father figure who would accept him for who he was.

Arguably the film’s greatest achievement is the way it depicts the complicated and fraught (and in some crucial ways oedipal) relationship between the Israeli agent and the Palestinian teen. On the one hand we know that this is a relationship based on naked and cynical interests. At the same time, however, there seems to be a genuine bond between the two. When Sanfur gets shot by one of his friends as a result of a juvenile game of dare gone terribly wrong, Razi is by his side in an Israeli hospital. And when an opportunity arises to gun down Sanfur’s older brother in an operation that may put Sanfur in danger, Razi makes sure that Sanfur hides out in Hebron at a safe distance. (This puts Razi in an awkward position with his superiors, who suspect that he put the well-being of his informer before the operation.) Early in the film Razi realizes that Sanfur has been lying to him, or at least he has been concealing the fact that he was collecting money transferred by Hamas to his brother. At this point Razi seemed to be upset not only that his operation might be in jeopardy but also that he was betrayed by someone whom he saw and cared for as if he were his own son. One of the moral questions Bethlehem raises is: Can genuine relationships that rely on caring and compassion exist in a time of deep political and military conflict, or do interests trump all emotional bonds? And indeed, while Bethlehem unfolds against the backdrop of a very specific political and military struggle, and the film echoes many real-life events, it is ultimately a tale of love and betrayal, and of the human potential for revenge against those who abandon us or use us in a time of need.

The protagonists of Bethlehem are Israeli security agents, Palestinian militants, and officials from the Palestinian Authority. The plot revolves around the killing of a leading Palestinian militant and its aftermath; the film reveals in chilling detail the behind-the-scenes workings of these groups. Yet this is not a political movie. If anything, it fits squarely in the Israeli cinema tradition of the post-political film—a genre now nearly five decades old and more prevalent than before—where the political serves only as a backdrop for the personal or human drama. We can trace this tradition back to films like Siege (Gilberto Tofano, 1969), where politics—the consequences of the 1967 War, the War of Attrition—provide the background noise (literally in the case of Siege, where radio news bulletins are an integral part of the film’s soundtrack) to the very personal struggle of a war widow to come to terms with her new life; or to a movie like...