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2 7 6 During the 1980s a remarkable phenomenon occurred in Israeli cinema. The main genre attracted leading directors who chose to identify with Israel’s most entrenched enemy—the Palestinian people. The major films of the decade addressed Palestinians suffering from the occupation, depicted Palestinian activists as freedom fighters, gave voice to the Arabic language and Arab worldview, and evoked positive feelings toward those who were perceived by the general public as threatening. The leading films of the 1980s were generally referred to as left-wing movies. In the 1990s these films gave way to a more personal and sectoral cinema. The 1990s dealt primarily with social circles in Tel Aviv, reexamined the absorption of immigrants in Israel, and looked at the relations between different Jewish groups such as Mizrahim and Ashkenazim.1 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, the IsraeliPalestinian conflict returned to Israeli movie screens. But this time movies about the conflict became just one of a broad spectrum of issues, and the treatment of the conflict combined the activist leanings of the 1980s with the hedonism of the 1990s. In other words, the depiction of the conflict is interwoven with the personal narratives of pleasure-loving young people. This has created films such as The Bubble (Habuʾah, Eytan Fox, 2006), which centers on a Tel Aviv crowd of young straight and homosexual men and women that for the first time contains a young Palestinian as well. The portrayal of the hedonistic Tel Aviv lifestyle, a frequent theme in the 1990s, is combined here with the depiction of the Israeli occupation in the territories. Over the course of Israeli cinematic history, the division into genres has yael ben-zvi-morad Borders in Motion The Evolution of the Portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Contemporary Israeli Cinema 20 Borders in Motion 2 7 7 reflected an inability to combine normal, routine life with life in the shadow of the conflict. Almost every genre of Israeli cinema has wrestled with the conflict separately from its treatment of universal personal themes and its portrayal of sectoral problems in Israeli society. Films made after 2000 combine the topics for the first time. If in the past the difficulty of combining routine life with life in the shadow of the conflict took the form of a split between genres, Israeli cinema in the first decade of the twenty-first century addresses this difficulty directly by juxtaposing the bourgeois Tel Aviv lifestyle with the conflict. In this sense Israeli cinema is grappling for the first time with a problem that it eschewed in previous decades. The portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now interwoven with a broad spectrum of personal and sectoral issues addressed by contemporary Israeli cinema. Often the issues are integrated into the films themselves, which present Israeli reality in all its complexity. For instance, Walk on Water (Lalekhet Al Hamayim, Eytan Fox, 2004) points out the links between the Holocaust, the negation of exile, and the occupation. The protagonist is a security officer who fights Palestinian terror. He represents the ultimate Sabra (native-born Israeli). He has always avoided setting foot on German soil because of the Holocaust, but a trip to Berlin on security business changes his worldview. According to Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, the negation of exile is a central factor in the Zionist metanarrative.2 He argues that the Holocaust is taken to prove the need for a Jewish state and for the negation of the Diaspora; the monumental memory of the Holocaust justifies Israel’s quest for security. The movie Walk on Water returns to the exile in general and to Germany in particular. Along with the persecution trauma that the protagonist experiences there, he also longs for the Diaspora and for the diasporic language while discovering a human and social complexity that is not dichotomous. His acceptance of the Diaspora and his struggles with the sense of persecution evoked by the trip to Germany reduce his impulse to see everything in terms of security and make it possible for him to see Palestinians not only as enemies but also as human beings. This process deconstructs the male rigidity of the Sabra and allows feminine and homosexual traits to penetrate the Israeli scene. Only Dogs Run Free (aka Wild Dogs; Rak Klavim Ratzim Khofshi, Arnon Zadok, 2007) focuses on the linkage of poverty, crime, violence against women, violence against Palestinians, and the disintegration of Israeli masculine identity. As noted, in...

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