by Ilan Pappe
A Children’s Horror Film: 1948 in the Cinema
The Cinema Album, edited by David Greenberg in the late 1960s, was an early attempt to summarise the history of Israeli cinema. Greenberg declared that until 1967, all the feature films on the 1948 war were produced by foreigners who failed
to comprehend the full meaning of this glorious period, but nonetheless helped to publicise it globally. This topic still awaits an Israeli director who will illuminate it from a novel vantage point; one which caters to the aspirations of the Israeli filmgoer.15
Although, according to Greenberg, the average Israeli filmgoer sought more realistic films and was not content with the beautification of the war, it is hard to find evidence for this. The local film industry continued to depict the war, whether in feature or documentary films, in heroic, idealistic terms, much the same way as did the foreign producers.
More to the point is the work of Nurith Gertz on this period. In various articles and in the only book of hers that appeared in English, Hirbet Hiza’a and the Morning After, she proposed that in the 1960s, the Israeli cinema was still a nationalist, Zionist and heroic medium, which located the troops and their adventures at the centre of cinematic production.16 Cinema was treated as a means for national propaganda; in fact, the officials appointed by the state to supervise and encourage local cinematic production stipulated that their offices would assist ‘educational and constructive films which would reflect the Israeli mentality’.17
Films of that period, as Ella Shohat has commented, focused on mythical Israeli heroes, all of them Sabras (Jews born in Palestine), kibbutzniks and soldiers. Many of these films used the Arab–Israeli conflict as the background for a story of one Israeli, or a group of Israelis, fighting a large number of Arabs, epitomising the struggle of Israel against the Arab world. Among such films were Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), What a Gang (1963), and Five Days in Sinai (1969), all of which related a personal story of heroism in the face of Arab barbarism and aggression. Quite often the Zionist warriors in these films ended up dead, and quite a few of the films end with a famous Israeli mantra from 1948 that was integrated into every speech given ever since by politicians on Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance for fallen soldiers: ‘In their death they gave us our life’.
Until the 1980s, nearly every film conformed to Zionist ideological guidance. The cinema reconstructed and maintained the mythology of the war and in particular left untouched the stereotypically negative image of the Arab. Because of the visual dimension of cinema, on the one hand, and the commercial demands of the industry on the other, the engagement with the Arab was more pointed and extensive than in any other medium (perhaps apart from children’s literature).
Actual Arabs rarely appear in these films; when they do, we know nothing about them – they are anonymous. Thus, although the hit film He Walked Through the Fields (1967) deals with the 1948 war, not one battle scene appears in it. In Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer, the Arabs are unseen but continually appear in the film’s narrative as the hidden threat. The Druze, Israel’s allies in that war, are fully visible (played by Jewish actors), as are the Jews themselves.
One of the leading myths was that the Jewish community faced an existential danger on the eve of the 1948 war. This is the theme of Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer. The film’s opening scene shows a strategic map of Israel, accompanied by a narration explaining the movement of the forces during the conflict. The arrows charted on the map present an alarming picture of an all-Arab assault on the Jewish community, and depict the entire country as a besieged bastion.18 The film was a pseudo-documentary, fully staged – a docudrama. This same depiction would later appear in the popular Israeli Carta atlases and in the current edition of Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of the Arab–Israeli Conflict.19
Cinema added its own dimension to the myth of annihilation and associated the Nazi ideology of human extermination with Arab intentions in 1948, as can be seen in films such as Hill 24, They Were Ten (1960), and of course Exodus (1960). An especially blunt version is to be found in the feature film Amud Ha’Esh (Pillar of Fire, 1959); not to be confused with a television series discussed later on with a similar name. It is the story of a small southern kibbutz locked in a desperate fight against Egyptian tanks.20 The American Jewish director Larry Frisch staged the film as a classical western, where the cowboys have to fight the savage Indians, who do not appear in the film but are implicitly present as targets whenever the brave Zionist soldiers shoot someone in the dark. In one scene, there are obscure images in the distance that seem to be dangerous Arabs.21
Some of the films directly associated the Palestinian or Arab threat with that of the Nazis. In a joint Italian–Israeli co-production, Judith (1966), Sophia Loren plays the wife of an ex-SS officer who was smuggled to Israel by the Hagana so that she could identify her husband, who was now helping the Arabs in the 1948 war. The same association appears in the film Exodus, adapted from Leon Uris’s famous novel, in which a sadistic Nazi expert orchestrates murderous Arab assaults on the Jewish community. Finally, in Hill 24, a humane Israeli soldier helps a badly wounded Egyptian soldier who turns out to be a German-speaking Nazi who tries to kill him at the first opportunity – although the Israeli soldier does not then kill the Nazi but merely defends himself.
Amud Ha’Esh, a TV documentary series directed by Yigal Lusin for the first, and that time the only, Israeli TV channel in 1981, gives the viewer a good sense of why the Israelis call the 1948 war the War of Independence. That year is described as the culmination of an anti-colonialist struggle against the evil British Empire. The British were defeated and so, according to this narration, left Palestine because they could not withstand the Jewish resistance against them. Meanwhile, the professional historiography indicated that the British decision to withdraw from Palestine arose from the overall and inevitable global collapse of the British Empire. This wider context informed the financial and regional strategic decisions that led to the end of British rule in Palestine.22
The lengthiest feature film on 1948 during those years was He Walked Through the Fields, based on a novel by Moshe Shamir. It presents the 1948 war almost exclusively as a war against the British; the Arabs are hardly there.23 The film tells the story of Uri (played by Moshe Dayan’s son, Asaf Dayan) – a fighter in the Palmach, the storm-troopers of the Hagana – and his love for an immigrant girl. He is a kibbutznik, the first child born in Palestine in the fictional kibbutz. Uri deserts his girlfriend in order to receive training under the nose of, and for the purpose of attacking, the British troops in Palestine. During training, Uri dies. This film is a good example of cinema being able to convey marginalisation and exclusion in a far more powerful way than is offered by the cool heads of historiography; primarily because of cinema’s potent visuality.
Dan and Sa’adia: The Ultimate Mythology
Intertwined with the myth of annihilation was the myth of the ‘few against many’, which the popular film Dan and Sa’adia illustrates better than any other. The full name of the film was Dan Quihote V’Sa’adia Pansa the obvious inferences of which have been aptly analysed by Ella Shohat. Here I am concerned with treating it as a cinematic representation of the classical historical version of the 1948 war.24
The film engages with all the foundational mythologies of the war and represents them through a fictional tale of individual Jewish heroism on the day of Israel’s independence. The film was produced in 1956 and was directed by Nathan Axelrod, one of Israel’s leading cinematic figures in the early years of statehood. His later documentary films were highly regarded, the best known of which was Etz o Palestine (The True Story of Palestine, 1962), named after the images found on the two sides of a Mandatory Palestine coin. Before the invention of modern cinematic appetisers, that film, which was the basis for the newsreel The Carmel Dairies, preceded every feature film.25
Israeli academics generally refer to Dan and Sa’adia, Axelrod’s first feature film, as a pioneering movie that broke away from Zionist pa
thos, and they characterise it as a fairly realistic and even cynical film about the ideology and mythology of the state. But viewed from a critical perspective, it seems deeply entrenched within the Zionist historical narrative.
The same can be said of the feature film Waltz with Bashir (2008) and the documentary The Gatekeepers (2012, nominated for an Oscar in 2013). Israeli Zionist critics would hail both as bold and courageous cinematic revisitings of the 1982 war on Lebanon, in the case of the former, and the evil of the occupation of Palestinian areas in the latter. In fact, it is possible to see these works as attempts to have one’s cake (support and participate in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon or the occupation) and eat it too (display public remorse and regret until the next invasion or while the occupation continues).26
Dan and Sa’adia tells the story of Dan, an Ashkenazi boy who is an avid reader of detective stories and lives in an imagined world of adventure and excitement, and Sa’adia, a Yemeni boy who shines shoes and is Dan’s friend and partner in his detective games. Dan is considered a troublemaker and is therefore sent to boarding school, where most of the film’s scenes take place. Sa’adia sneaks into the car that takes Dan away, and stays with him. All this happens just a few days after the State of Israel was declared on 15 May 1948 and war broke out. The head boys in the boarding school are busy collecting weapons, hiding them from watchful British eyes, and training for the real fighting. Dan and Sa’adia continue their detective games, steal a crate full of hand grenades (not knowing the its contents), and hide the crate as pirates’ treasure.
Fear of an Arab attack leads to the children being evicted from the boarding school, leaving behind the two young companions, the teachers, and the military troops. The teachers worry that the ammunition they have accumulated before the war will not be enough to repel the attack. To their rescue come Dan and Saadia, who avoided the eviction and now understand that the treasure they hid could save the Yishuv. When they go to the orchard where they hid the crate, they happen to eavesdrop on a meeting among Arabs who are contemplating a night attack on the Jews (they are able to follow the conversation, because Sa’adia the Yemeni knows Arabic). Using the hand grenades, the children prepare a deadly trap that saves their boarding school from destruction.
Fear of annihilation and the almost miraculous acts that avoid it are recurring motifs in this film. Fear and pride are conveyed through a microhistorical focus on the conflict as a reflection of the macrohistorical picture. The boarding school is ‘surrounded by Arabs’ and is saved by the valour of the two boys – one Ashkenazi and the other Mizrachi – signifying another foundational myth, the unity of Jewish exiles from all over the world.
These two new Jewish heroes face Arab danger without for a moment losing their humanity. Although the peril of extinction would normally raise suspicions against anybody who is an Arab, the two schoolboys, unlike all other teenagers in the world, resist this tendency. The viewers see this when, in Dan’s imagination, an innocent Arab woman momentarily turns into an Arab wearing a keffiyeh and holding a gun. Arab violence is responsible for the demonisation in young Dan’s mind, which in turn can explain the collateral damage sometimes meted out to the Arabs by the Zionists. But the woman soon transforms back into the innocent person she is. Apart from this scene, however, the Arabs are shown as an incited mob, complete with keffiyehs and guns – in other words, the potential terrorists portrayed in scholarly works up to the 1980s.
As a rule the Arab characters in Dan and Sa’adia are anonymous and part of a crowd, while the Jewish forces are humane, courageous individuals. The Arabs are always seen as a massive throng, emphasising the myth of the many against the few, but their numbers are also testimony to their inferiority. The inferior, incited Arab mob used to be as common a theme in Israeli movies about 1948 as it is in British films about the British Empire. Even after it became clear that 1948 was not a war between few and many, Arabs still appeared for a while as a dangerous mob. Later, during the First and Second Intifadas, and despite the many transformations in the interim in the image of the Arab, mob scenes similar to those in Dan and Sa’adia reappeared in the visual and written descriptions of Palestinian resistance of 1987 and 2000.
The incited Arab mob, like the ‘Arab villain’ archetype in Israeli cinema then and now, is motivated by sheer callousness, embedded in ‘Arab nature’. For scholars, the force of these archetypes meant that Arab violence need not be explained, merely described. Thus one does not have to wonder why the Arabs in the orchard wished to destroy a boarding school. In the film, as in mainstream Zionist historiography, it is also unclear why the Arab states launched a war in 1948. In the opening scene, news headlines tell the story of the Arab invasion of Israel, the sirens in Tel Aviv. One headline reads, ‘A Boarding School Is Surrounded by Arabs’. Factual and fictional events mingle in the representation of a reality in which Israel was under siege and in danger of being annihilated. This siege mentality would not subside even as it became increasingly difficult to furnish support for its existence.
The absence of a logical explanation for the Arab attack on Israel in general and on the boarding school in particular signals the worst kind of violence: meaningless and cruel assault. Film is good at conveying unexplainable evil and special cruelty. This same theme appeared even more forcefully in an older film, Ha-Fuga (Intermission), made by Amram Amar in 1950, which tells the story of Miriam, a female Jewish soldier caught in the fighting by two Arabs and saved by Gideon, a typically omnipotent Zionist who is the new Jewish male and who is in love with both Miriam and another woman.
The romance is the main theme of the film but its depictions of Arabs are quite striking. In the main, they represent the absolute opposite of the new Jew, Gideon. They are potential rapists and worse. They have no respect for guns or friends. One of the captive Arabs is invited to play cards with the soldiers and shows himself willing to gamble away his rifle and that of his friend – the ultimate sin and crime in the eyes of a militarised society such as Israel.
Dan and Sa’adia, too, engage directly with Arab characters. Although the Arabs are the enemy that defines the reality, their basic function is to provide the setting and background for a closer examination of the internal tensions in Jewish society between men and women, Ashkenazi and Mizrachi Jews, the individual and the collective. The Arabs in Dan and Sa’adia do not seem to enjoy the ordinary things in life, whereas the staff at the boarding school – the principal, the teacher Aviva, the poet Uri, the shepherd Yoram (who is in love with Aviva, who is in love with the principal) – are three-dimensional, humane characters. These people get hurt and wounded; they love and ache. They are real human beings with emotions and personalities, and thus the viewer forms a bond with them. Not so the Arabs who meet in the orchard – we know nothing about them, not even their names.
Another dismal, pathetic character who crops up in this and similar films on the war is the new Jewish immigrant, who is easily identified by his heavy accent in Hebrew and is often overweight and cowardly. This anti-hero is also an anti-Sabra. The immigrant appears as stereotypical as the Arab, but there is a difference between the two. The immigrant will eventually be modernised and nationalised, mainly through military service. But the violence of the Arabs is explained by their savagery, which directly as well as indirectly leads to thoughts, not of how to modernise them, but rather how to get rid of them.
Cinematic representation of the early chapters in the Zionist narrative relies in part on the visual apparatus of marginalisation and exclusion. Thus, for instance, Axelrod’s Tree or Palestine focuses on the history of the Jewish community during the closing ten years of the British Mandate. It is a collage of documentary footage, edited in both an amusing and a nostalgic way. It begins with a scene in which one can see Arabs and camels resting beneath trees. In the background plays the Zionist song ‘Anu Banu Artza’ (‘We Came to Our Homeland’). The Arabs in this scene appear as a pagan, primitive tribe. The narrator explains that they know nothing abo
ut mechanised agriculture. ‘Is this our coveted homeland?’ asks the narrator in a lamenting voice. The answer is no, not as long as ‘they’ are there.
This is no different from the representation of the Arabs in Dan and Sa’adia: essentialist, simplistic, reduced. It is typically Orientalist, but with one important variant: above and beyond the familiar Western condescension are additional thick layers of animosity, suspicion and racism. More blunt than dry academic discourse, cinema carries these emotions straight to the viewer.
More important, film presents the Arab as a danger to be removed, although it was not until the emergence of post-Zionist cinema in the 1990s that their actual removal was addressed in any Israeli feature or documentary about 1948. Nevertheless, the fate of the Arabs is an issue that arises in such films. They expose the typical colonialist dilemma concerning the evil enemy of the benevolent empire who foolishly decides to resist the takeover and occupation of his homeland. He is both harmless because of his primitive essence and yet dangerous because of his savagery, and therefore needs to be countered by a combination of sophistication and exceptional heroism.
This dual colonialist view of the indigene appears repeatedly in adventures such as the tales of Jules Verne and Rudyard Kipling. But in Dan and Sa’adia, there is a different formula: the savage enemy is defeated by children. One must then ask, How dangerous could the enemy be if children can outsmart and crush him? And indeed, Dan and Sa’adia directly and clearly exposes the problematic messages of the annihilation myth – how to reconcile the pathetic Arabs that appear on-screen as stupid grown-ups who can easily be overpowered by two children, with the belief that Arabs are as bad and dangerous as the Nazis? The film presents the Jewish community in Palestine as facing destruction, and yet the threat comes from a handful of pitiable Arabs. As a result, the contradictory messaging about the nature of the menacing Arabs undermines the myth of annihilation, even though this contradiction is softened somewhat by the contention that the unsophisticated Arabs are dangerous because of their numbers rather than their capabilities. In Hollywood, it requires physically and mentally superhuman heroes, such as those played by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis, to defeat Arab and Islamic evil. Not so in Zionist cinema. There, the contradiction between a pathetic enemy and the myth of Zionist heroism is not so easily resolved.
