One of our readers just emailed me (I’m back from vacation, and from getting our Sept/Oct issue to print before that, which is why you haven’t heard from me for a while):

For the last several; weeks I have been following Tikkun Daily. I watch Israel get beaten into the ground as if it is the bad guy in the region. Rarely do I see columns that reveal the complexity of the conflict from all perspectives.

Recently I came upon the review of a documentary by Shlomi Eldar entitled “Precious Life”. I checked to see if anything in Tikkun Daily was written about it and I found nothing. I am hoping it comes to the US so I have the opportunity to see it. The documentary appears to reveal how difficult it is to favor one position over another. if you wish, here’s a review of the documentary. There is a strong sense of Tikkun Olam in it.

I know Tikkun is a left leaning magazine, but a little balance would go a long way in helping your readers understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Thank you, David Stein, for the link to this remarkable movie review. Shlomi Eldar is an award-winning Israeli journalist. In this piece he says of a report he filed in 1992 about Palestinian children who were hurt during the intifada,

“Back then no one believed that there could be such a thing as the IDF hurting children,” he says sarcastically. “But I filmed disabled children, wounded children in hospitals, children who had been beaten, children who talked like old people about life and death. I remember meeting two girls there from affluent homes who changed my approach to the Palestinian situation. They told me how their home had been demolished during an operation to capture wanted men. I came back with powerful material and put together a report that for the first time showed children who had been wounded by Israeli fire. When I recorded the narration, my voice cracked from emotion. I realized I had dynamite. That was the report that really got me into Gaza.”

He covered Gaza for two decades, but when Israel invaded Gaza and he was unable to go there, he found himself covering, and filming, an Israeli hospital’s struggle to save a Gazan couple’s baby. He is drawn deeply into the family’s trust, but then is dumbfounded when the baby’s mother, Raida, says she hopes her boy will survive and grow up to be a suicide bomber, a shahid, a martyr.

“It is a regular thing,” she smiles at him. “Life is not precious. Life is precious, but not for us. For us, life is nothing, not worth a thing. That is why we have so many suicide bombers. They are not afraid of death. None of us, not even the children, are afraid of death. It is natural for us. After Mohammed gets well, I will certainly want him to be a shahid. If it’s for Jerusalem, then there’s no problem. For you it is hard, I know; with us, there are cries of rejoicing and happiness when someone falls as a shahid. For us a shahid is a tremendous thing.”

That was enough to drain Eldar’s motivation and dissolve all the compassion he had felt for Raida and Mohammed.

“It was an absolutely terrible rift,” he recalls. “After I saw how intensely she fought for her son’s life, I could not accept what she said. I had seen her standing for hours, caressing him, warming him up, kissing him. At the time I also had an infant of Mohammed’s age at home. I couldn’t understand where it came from in her. I was devastated. It was all so paradoxical, too, because just as she was talking about the shahids, two Jewish women entered the room and brought her toys and a stroller as presents.”

He stops filming but in the end starts again. It appears to be a remarkable movie:

“People come out of the film and talk about how they have been shaken up. They tell me that for days after seeing it that they couldn’t get it out of their minds. That is very moving. But besides the personal aspect of this, I also discovered a type of new hope, something deeper in regard to the conflict. When the peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians was signed between Rabin and Arafat, I believed that its origins, in fact, lay in Israeli prisons. The encounter between Israelis and Palestinians in the prisons started with enmity and suspicion, and then something happened. Something softened, and wardens and inmates became friends.

“That is exactly the process I see now in the hospitals. Raida was also very suspicious when she first arrived here. But she discovered human beings, Israeli nurses who kiss her son. She let them sing him Hebrew lullabies. Filming her, I understood that the next peace process is taking shape in our hospitals.”

For those who assume Shlomi Eldar would agree with those (like Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives) who were against Israel’s invasion of Gaza, there is a surprise:

It’s clear to me that the war in Gaza was justified – no country can allow itself to be fired at with Qassam rockets -

But he goes on to say:

but I did not see many people pained by the loss of life on the Palestinian side. Because we were so angry at Hamas, all the Israeli public wanted was to fuck Gaza. It’s not by chance that I use that crass word. I use it because it was often heard on the street and it was a military slogan. I remember the wife of my barber telling me, ‘Let them kill all the Palestinians, let them burn.’

“It wasn’t until after the incident of Dr. Abu al-Aish – the Gaza physician I spoke with on live TV immediately after a shell struck his house and caused the death of his daughters, and he was shouting with grief and fear – that I discovered the silent majority that has compassion for people, including Palestinians. I found that many Israeli viewers shared my feelings. That was not the intention with which I set out, but the film creates a kind of encounter. Even though the woman speaks Arabic and sometimes covers her face, even though the ‘stars’ are a Palestinian couple – Israeli viewers are able to see themselves through them. When Raida cries for her baby, the audience cries with her, and when she laughs, they laugh with her.”

The whole movie review is here.


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