Identity Politics on the Israeli Screen

Chapter Six. Forbidden Love in the Holy Land: Transgressing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

112 chapter six Forbidden Love in the Holy Land Transgressing the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict ■ The provocation is a love story. Nissim Dayan, director of On a Narrow Bridge ■ If you think that we are going to be Romeo and Juliet, then forget it. I don’t believe in those stories. They are only good for the movies. Nadia, the female Palestinian protagonist of Nadia, to Ronen, an Israeli Jewish boy ■ In essence the story seems banal. We know over thousands of versions of love stories between a Jewish woman and Arab man in the context of the conflict that end in the doom of the woman. There are many ways to do that; the question is which one you choose. Benny Barabash, scriptwriter of Gideon Ganani’s Crossfire ■ It could have worked if an Arab man had fallen in love with an Israeli woman. We have already seen this in Hamsin and Hannah K. But an Israeli man falling for an Arab woman? Give me a break. Potential financier to Nissim Dayan Israeli new historian Ilan Pappe claims that “most Israeli filmmakers . . . feel the need to use the sexual and romantic bridge as a way to understand the other side. Most of the films that courageously deal with Arab-Jewish relationships choose the medium of a love story, which is usually tragic (for example in Hamsin, The Lover and On a Narrow Bridge).” According to Pappe, this need is “a way to avoid and evade rational recognition of the arguments Forbidden Love in the Holy Land 113 and feelings of the other side. Nevertheless, these films reflect impressive progress relative to the films made before 1967, in which collaboration with Arabs was possible only given unconditional support of the Zionist project.”1 Pappe, however, does not forget to mention that there is one salient difference between “the attitude of Israeli cinema and the new Israeli historiography toward the topic of friendship and cooperation: Whereas the historians draw optimistic conclusions from these attempts at collaboration, Israeli cinema, by contrast, chooses the model of Greek tragedy in order to convey a pessimistic message about the impossibility of overcoming the mutual hatred, as in the film Hamsin.”2 Stories of “forbidden love,” dealing mainly with interracial romances, are a recurring theme in Western culture. European colonizers and their settler descendants have always been terrified by the prospect of miscegenation. “The fear of mixing blood stems from a desire to maintain the separation between the colonizer and the colonized, the ‘civilized’ and the ‘savage,’ yet that binary masks a profound longing, occluding the idea of the inevitable dependence of one on the existence of the other.”3 Similar fears of mixing blood exist in Jewish Israeli society. They were vividly described by Daniel Wachsmann , the director of Hamsin: “We screened Hamsin at a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz (the most left-wing youth movement in the Zionist Left). Some of the members, liberals of European origin, were as disturbed by the subject matter as Jews from Arab countries who are very vocal about their anti-Arab bias. They were apparently less upset by the thought that young women from the kibbutz have affairs with Scandinavian volunteers than that one might sleep with an Arab.”4 “Real” (nonreel) stories of forbidden love between Jews and Arabs in Israel usually exist far from the public eye. When they are exposed to public attention , it is because they have a criminal component or because the lovers have been subject to extreme social hardship as a result. The displacement, taking place in Israeli cinema, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the territory of forbidden love, makes it easier for the Israeli audience, as Pappe rightly observes, to encounter the conflict whose roots are complex and painful. Furthermore, the transfer of the conflict to the intimacy of the private space “loosens,” and sometimes even disarms, the defense mechanism erected by many Israelis when confronted with “the conflict.” It is easier to face the “big” conflict when it is broken down into “small” conflicts that aim to negotiate its meaning on the microlevel. Hence, the shifting of the conflict onto the terrain of forbidden love is used in Israeli cinema as a distanciation device. Ultimately the tautologous nature of these cinematic tales is that the end of the forbidden love story, and by implication of the conflict...